Great premise of a movie - owes an awful lot to Altman, and Short Cuts in particular (attempted suicide in garage, lecherous cop, reunion of relatives in face of imminent death, supernatural occurance etc being the narrative similarities; multiple stories of everyday confused folk being the subject matter; 'aren't folk messed-up' being the common theme...) [If only they'd kept it in the style of the three opening stories (of stuff that just happened) throughout the movie...?]
Yet somehow Altman is a better storyteller - P.T. Anderson is a master of issue avoidance - how many times did he dodge the crux of a scene, having a character say "The thing about my problem/idea is..." at the crucial dramatic peak, before cutting away to the next person. We got to see who these people were, and how they were different from each other, but very little about what made these well delineated individuals actually tick.
Similarly, inter-cutting several different stories as they reach their little climaxes is no substitute for making any one climax moving/dramatic. A cop struggling around in the rain for his gun is not made any more or less involving for the intercutting with a kid not answering questions on a TV show because he needs the bathroom. And with Tom Cruise sitting out an interview in silence, and a nurse on perpetual hold on a telephone being thrown into the mix, it's more a case of anti-climaxes than climaxes - so why the histrionic, tension building crescendos on the sound-track?!?
Only the 'plague of frogs' ending really elevated it onto something wholly original, but it did keep going... and going... (again, anti-climaxes).
The performances - well, most of the praise has been given, and the majority has been justified. Cruise got an Oscar nomination, and Philip Seymour Hoffman is flavour of the month with the independent cinema crowd; Julianne Moore has done her best work for both Altman and Anderson. Yet watch how all three have key scenes with Jason Robards, the real pro in the film as far as I am concerned. He demonstrates a sureness of touch with underplaying his scenes to just the right degree, not flinching as the others spit out the sawdust from chewing the scenery by comparison. Alright, it's a difficult role to go wrong with by compared to them, but notice that he neither responds melodramatically when they interact with him, nor lies there completely silently and still like so many other movie-patients - a really well judged physical and emotional performance.
Overall, I really liked the detail - so much of it. But what I worried about was that detail had been included at the expense of clarity. It was lovely to finally notice that it was Robards' Earl Partridge that had produced the kids TV show that Philip Baker Hall had been presenting, but wouldn't it have been a tiny bit better if I had noticed that a little earlier on (and how many people were there in the cinema with me who missed it?)
A really great film that didn't quite get there, (but continually kept me absorbed), or perhaps two not really spectacular movies mixed together in the hope that they would create a greater impression than the individual parts (which they didn't - two wrongs don't make a right).
Yet somehow Altman is a better storyteller - P.T. Anderson is a master of issue avoidance - how many times did he dodge the crux of a scene, having a character say "The thing about my problem/idea is..." at the crucial dramatic peak, before cutting away to the next person. We got to see who these people were, and how they were different from each other, but very little about what made these well delineated individuals actually tick.
Similarly, inter-cutting several different stories as they reach their little climaxes is no substitute for making any one climax moving/dramatic. A cop struggling around in the rain for his gun is not made any more or less involving for the intercutting with a kid not answering questions on a TV show because he needs the bathroom. And with Tom Cruise sitting out an interview in silence, and a nurse on perpetual hold on a telephone being thrown into the mix, it's more a case of anti-climaxes than climaxes - so why the histrionic, tension building crescendos on the sound-track?!?
Only the 'plague of frogs' ending really elevated it onto something wholly original, but it did keep going... and going... (again, anti-climaxes).
The performances - well, most of the praise has been given, and the majority has been justified. Cruise got an Oscar nomination, and Philip Seymour Hoffman is flavour of the month with the independent cinema crowd; Julianne Moore has done her best work for both Altman and Anderson. Yet watch how all three have key scenes with Jason Robards, the real pro in the film as far as I am concerned. He demonstrates a sureness of touch with underplaying his scenes to just the right degree, not flinching as the others spit out the sawdust from chewing the scenery by comparison. Alright, it's a difficult role to go wrong with by compared to them, but notice that he neither responds melodramatically when they interact with him, nor lies there completely silently and still like so many other movie-patients - a really well judged physical and emotional performance.
Overall, I really liked the detail - so much of it. But what I worried about was that detail had been included at the expense of clarity. It was lovely to finally notice that it was Robards' Earl Partridge that had produced the kids TV show that Philip Baker Hall had been presenting, but wouldn't it have been a tiny bit better if I had noticed that a little earlier on (and how many people were there in the cinema with me who missed it?)
A really great film that didn't quite get there, (but continually kept me absorbed), or perhaps two not really spectacular movies mixed together in the hope that they would create a greater impression than the individual parts (which they didn't - two wrongs don't make a right).