California Split
A common criticism of Robert Altman—not so common that I can produce a link, of course, but one that should ring at least plausible to viewers of Nashville and Short Cuts—is that he is callous and cruel towards his characters. California Split, a movie about two men (Elliot Gould and George Segal) who turn their lives over to gambling, suggests that Altman is not callous, but the universe in which he sets his characters is, itself, indifferent to their fates.Movie universes tend to swaddle their characters in portent. Novels have the space to turn a room or two over to storing rich details that connect only distantly to the plot, but movies don't have the luxury to be useless to their characters, who require the complete devotion of the mise-en-scene to get them from A to B, whether that is an emotional blossoming or finding the Ark of the Covenant.Here, the universe does not care. If it did, it would have taught Segal's character a thing or two by interrupting his run. But in California Split, you can meet misery after winning $80,000 or so, without blowing it; you can blithely seduce a prostitute in need of redemptive attention and leave the encounter unpunished, and her no smarter about her heart for the attention. (Note that the actress playing the prostitute, Gwen Welles, chronicled an American Idol foretold in Nashville, where she had the good fortune to strip for Nashville's finest political donors, and probably kicked off the Altman-is-a-heartless-bastard hypothesis.)
posted by Josh K-sky at
6:15 PM
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