User Reviews

This Robert Altman film has not seen much light of the day since its very brief release in 1980, followed by a short commercial release two years later. Coming out originally during the era of the Carter/Reagan presidential election, this deals with the election of the president of a National Health Organization, focusing on various health issues of all sorts and the campaign right before election day at the health festival. The candidates for president are 83 year old virgin Lauren Bacall and the outspoken Glenda Jackson secrets are revealed in a stunning twist of events. In the center of this perplexing black comedy is Carol Burnett as the health adviser to the current United States president who secretly supports Jackson and is astonished by the secrets she learns.

This ensemble cast also includes James Garner, Donald Moffat, Henry Gibson and Charmaine Woodard, with Moffat and Gibson (in drag!) standing out in showy roles, and Woodard proving once again how underrated a performer she is. Of the three leading ladies, it is Jackson who stands out, with Bacall's character not really all that well developed and Burnett basically playing a variation of Eunice (albeit a lucky Eunice in a highly influential position) without mama stepping on her every dream. Jackson, commanding and strong, gets the best writing, the rest of the script weak and aggravating.

Quirky, even by director Robert Altman standards, this has many good ideas but fails to deliver. I have seen films about various types of elections before, and this is as far from "The Best Man" as you can get. Dick Cavett, as himself, does get to deliver an interesting performance, covering the event and revealing subtle ruthlessness in getting the story. The comedy surrounding Burnett is forced, seemingly influenced by her experience in skit comedy. The funniest moments come from the ironies in the story. However, most of the time, it's really just rather talkin and ultimately dangerously dull.

This one sat on the shelf for a couple of years despite being made by Robert Altman, and no wonder - it's barely watchable for non-fans of the director, and will probably disappoint those who are, as well. It's notable for having a predominantly female main cast, yet the only actor who gives some teeth to the satire is Donald Moffat (before the teeth are removed in the penultimate sequence). Rudderless, purposeless, and perhaps worst of all, laughless, this is one of Altman's commercial and artistic failures. *1/2 out of 4.

"We have lost interest in our Constitution and democratic ideals. None of this has made us happier, wealthier, healthier, safer or better custodians of this land." - Sam Smith

"If it moves, tax it." – Ronald Reagan

A satire of the 1980 American presidential campaign, Robert Altman's "HealtH" takes place entirely within a glitzy Florida hotel, and uses a zany health food convention as an allegory for the various deceptive, dishonest and downright bizarre political manoeuvrings which typically occur during an election year.

Despite the film's title, an acronym for "Happiness, Energy And Longevity Through Health", Altman seeks not only to mock the health and fitness craze of the early 80s, with its fad diets and grotesque leotards, but to deride those "sickly people" responsible for looking after a country's "health" and "productivity". The "candidates" running for "election" at this health food convention are thus a trio of emotionally and intellectually challenged oddballs, one a 83 year old virgin who occasionally slips into a catatonic state, and another a pseudo-intellectual transgender. Rallying against what he sees to be an unfair two party system, which allows voters to choose only between a pair of idiots, is an "independent candidate" called Dr Gil Gainey. But Gainey is so ignored by the media that he relies on spectacular stunts to garner whatever publicity he can, and when the cameras do finally turn to him, he simply reveals himself to be yet another scheming huckster.

The film is anarchic, but Altman's humour is so deadpan and his various symbolic episodes so difficult to read, that the film's overall tone is one of monotony. All the usual Robert Altman traits are here - layered dialogue, multi-threaded plot lines, ensemble casts and a style in which a roaming camera floats from one nodule to the next, stumbling upon bits and pieces of a "story" which is non-defined and left up to the viewer to synthesise – but rather than enrich his tale, Altman's sprawling style seems to dilute the film's satirical and comedic edge.

But though the film doesn't work as drama, comedy or satire, for those willing to pay close attention to what is actually going on, some pretty timely themes begin to appear. Observe, for example, how Altman has Texan businessmen controlling the film's election. Observe how the votes are rigged and the film's electoral outcome already predetermined. Observe too how the "next convention" at the hotel is a "hypnotism convention" (implying that the nation's acceptance of the presidency is a kind of sham or mass delusion), how various motifs hint of the assassinations of "third party candidates", how Altman deftly aligns politics with show business, how completely disillusioned the film's ending is (despite its upbeat facade), how the lead characters symbolise America's cultural shift away from the liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s to the conservatism of the 1980s, how the "health food" candidates are either staunch adversaries of consumer capitalism or exude the kind of passivity and doped up self-satisfaction of Reaganism and how the film anticipates today's "prozac nation", the allure of health fads and anti-depressants the dark underside of a system that is wholly unhealthy. And of course Altman has always been great - particularly in his terrible films - in the way he captures the increasingly simulacral fakeness of contemporary capitalism.

For this reason, the capitalisation of the second H in the film's title ("HealtH") is very important. With the second "Health" capitalised, the film's title becomes an acronym within an acronym, meaning (quite paradoxically) "Happiness, Energy and Longevity Through Happiness, Energy and Longevity". In other words, the American Dream through believing in the American Dream. This was a common theme for Altman, many of his films dealing with a nest of characters whose faith in the ubiquitous virtues of the market is seen to be as monomaniacal and psychotic as the creeds of religious fundamentalists.

Like Altman's "California Split", "HealtH" is therefore not only about national/personal health, but national/personal addiction, where the cure for capitalism's discontents is itself "the cause of the problem" (think the miracle drug Prozac, which relies upon repeated acts of commodity consumption).

So everyone in this film, like "California Split", is "normal" despite being an addict in some way. As "addiction" is a process which converts human pleasure into a kind of consumer dependency, it's unsurprising that consumer capitalism is the economic system in which addictions have diversified and awareness of addiction itself has become commonplace. Not only does capitalism encourage its users to become dependent upon a particular form of repetitive action, it is in capitalism's interest to engender addictive dependency in its subjects in order to maintain itself and produce the illusion that there is no alternative.

Incidentally, this film was shelved for a number of years and didn't receive a mainstream release. Altman's next film, "Popeye", was a big box office hit, but he'd spend the 80s filming stage plays, TV shows or very small productions.

6/10 – Prophetic but ponderous. Worth one viewing.

The minor reputation of HealtH among Robert Altman's films isn't really undeserved - it's immediately recognizable (stylistically and tonally) as his, but in this case that often seems largely as a function of self-absorbed affectations, seldom revealing anything very meaningful about the situation under examination, or about anything beyond it. The setting is a resort hotel, and the national convention of a health association, focusing on a race for its presidency between two unsuitable individuals (Lauren Bacall and Glenda Jackson); the mix includes a White House representative (Carol Burnett) and her ex-husband (James Garner) who now works on the Bacall character's campaign. That last detail, with its intimations of privileged connections and influences, is just part of a broad political allegory that includes various Watergate-inflected dirty tricks, a third candidate fighting hopelessly for attention, and (rather peculiarly) repeated comparisons between Jackson's character and Adlai Stevenson. But again, this amounts to correspondences (for example, the entirely generic, or else incoherent, promises of the two candidates) and references rather than to resonant illumination or commentary, and in the end events mostly just peter out. Even Altman's more notable movies - California Split - for instance, run the risk of being consumed by the underlying emptiness that they examine: in the case of HealtH, Altman's interest in the edges and the backgrounds and the asides ends up looking like a reluctance to look too directly at anything at all (hucksterism and fake science don't come under as concerted an attack as they might, for instance). But there are plenty of minor compensations, including the presence of all those name actors (albeit that they mostly seem to be moving in their own barely connecting worlds) and of Dick Cavett, very convincingly playing himself, trying in vain to squeeze some meaningful television out of all this, before settling down alone each night to watch Johnny Carson.