Brewster McCloud

BREWSTER MCCLOUD   ***1/2

Robert Altman

1970

IDEA:  In a fallout shelter under the Houston Astrodome, a hermetic young man builds a winged contraption in the hopes of taking flight. Meanwhile, outside, the police investigate a series of murders marked by bird droppings.

BLURB:  Altman’s M*A*S*H follow-up, like many of his best works to come, is a rowdily witty satire that moves according to its own off-kilter rhythms and free-associative, self-reflexive logic. It’s a dense, dialectical tapestry of images and sounds that feel as though they threaten to outpace our comprehension, but not without thrilling us with sheer cinematic verve and ingenuity. In his trademark overlapping dialogue, lively soundtrack, madcap crosscutting, and crash zooms, Altman serves up an apposite expression of an antic, maddening post-1960s American zeitgeist. His targets are as numerous as the metaphors and allusions that spatter his film like the ever-present bird shit: nationalism, capitalism, corrupt politicians, inept law enforcement, racists, Texas gun culture, and, above all, the conservative establishment that enables them all. Brewster McCloud has a pretty straightforward plot, but its pleasures are all in its anarchic form, a sui generis mishmash of police procedural, coming-of-age, and fantasy tropes with a trendy Bullitt-esque car chase sequence for good measure. It may be far from Altman’s most refined or richly character-driven film - Bud Cort’s titular flight-obsessed loner is just about as anonymous as his proto-Waldo getup suggests - but Brewster McCloud never fails to delight in its shaggy and mordantly irreverent ways.