Originally written and posted on November 21, 2006. I’ve still never really enjoyed MASH, and I still haven’t seen Nashville all the way through, but I now have seen and love McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
This very weekend I sat and watched A Prairie Home Companion. It was a lovely thing – funny and sad and whimsical. Very much the sort of thing you’d expect from a collaboration of Garrison Keillor and Robert Altman. It’s got the sort of down-home, Mid-West low-key charm you expect from Keillor, and the rolling, dialogue over dialogue doesn’t really have a plot appeal of Altman.
Watching the documentaries about the movie I learned that the studio hired a secondary director just in case Altman died while making it. Now I’ve learned he really has died, and I’m suddenly inexplicably sad.
I can’t begin to say I’ve seen all of the director’s 87 films, nor can I pretend to have liked all the ones I watched (I’ve never found MASH to be all that funny, Nashville is snoresville to me, and I can’t seem to ever make it through McCabe and Mrs. Miller) but there are so many films that I love and cherish that the world’s loss, is my loss too.
I’ll never forget sitting in a friend’s dorm room for an all-night film fest ending with the rambling and oh-so-entertaining The Player, and Short Cuts, thinking this is what filmmaking and life are all about? He managed to update The Long Goodbye to the 70’s making it relevant all over again, and almost out Bogied Bogie with Elliot Gould of all people.
He made a musical out of Popeye, and damn what the critics say, he made it great.
More recently he created a wonderful Upstairs/Downstairs murder mystery and forgot to tell us whodunit.
His style was more laid back than grilled cheese. He seemed to just let the camera roll and the actors do what they please. Sometimes this didn’t work and we got something more of a mess than a film. But when it worked it was pure gold.
Rest in Peace Robert Altman, you deserve it.
themidnightcafe.org 