Short Cuts

SHORT CUTS   ***

Robert Altman

1993

IDEA:  Based on stories by Raymond Carver, several lives intersect over a few days in Los Angeles.

BLURB:  Los Angeles can be like a fishbowl, its own self-contained environment with inhabitants that don’t experience the other side of the glass. It’s no wonder fish are among the key motifs in Altman’s LA-based Short Cuts, or that one of the first images we see is a marker of geographic containment: a sign declaring a quarantine on produce amid a medfly infestation. Watching it now, after the explosion of films about American suburban ennui it helped spawn in the ‘90s and ‘00s, Short Cuts feels like something archetypal, even banal: a multithreaded tapestry of bored, self-absorbed, white and largely middle-class suburbanites whose material wealth can’t placate their insecurities, destructive erotic drives, or overall emotional dissatisfaction. If Short Cuts still seems singular in a way many of its heirs don’t, it’s because of Altman’s acerbic behavioral observation and his mastery in coherently orchestrating a huge ensemble cast across a dozen or so narrative strands. Although not at the level of Nashville, the fluidity with which his characters bump up against or run parallel to each other is a remarkable feat of writing, acting, and editing, with unexpected connections constantly emerging from the noise. Altman revels in ironic juxtapositions, often between mass culture and private life, and he is as ever fascinated by human idiosyncrasy and the systems as well as the contingencies that underwrite our social interactions. Short Cuts never coalesces into a point, but its accumulation of detail creates a savage picture of consumerism, marriage, and gender roles that betrays Altman’s bone-deep cynicism, and that brings his sexist and ethnocentric tendencies uncomfortably to the fore. With this great director, how much is critique — of toxic masculinity, the objectification of women, the exclusion of minorities — and how much is complicity? That it’s never clear is part of what makes Short Cuts as compelling as it is troubling, and always a rich, knotty, unsettled text worth chewing over. 

Eddington

EDDINGTON   ***

Ari Aster

2025

IDEA:  In late May of 2020, a disaffected sheriff decides to contest the mayorship in the small town of Eddington, New Mexico. 

BLURB:  Many years from now, if someone wanted to get a feeling for the American zeitgeist in the 2020s, Eddington might just be the exemplary representation in narrative fiction cinema from the era. Although perhaps strained in some of its appeals to “timeliness,” especially in its more stilted first half, the film is ultimately a scathing and viscerally unsettling portrait of a profoundly sick nation eating itself alive. Aster holds a magnifying glass up to much of what is deranged and broken about the US, especially as exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic: rampant, targeted media disinformation and conspiracy-mongering, unchecked government corruption, non-functioning jurisprudence, and, as tragically as always, an insatiable appetite for and easy access to guns. It’s only appropriate that he should set this pitch-black satire of sociopolitical collapse within the framework of the classical Hollywood Western, with its mythological inscription of such bedrock American ideals as law, order, freedom, and individualism. Eddington pointedly and grimly undermines all of these codes; the civilizing process of the frontier is reversed as atomization and anomie replace social integration, and the white-hatted would-be hero, Sheriff Joe Cross, devolves into a feral, amoral chaos-agent who utterly fails as a man and a leader. In its harrowing last act, the film becomes not just an indictment of a society that has lost its tether to reality, but of the deeply insecure, morally feeble, and self-interested people in positions of power who exploit that fact so they can hold society captive and destroy it. There’s a lot one could take issue with in such a bold, politically fraught work, whether it’s overly broad or flippant observations (at times, the treatment of Black Lives Matter) or a defeatist sense of cynicism and misanthropy. If Eddington can get past some caveats, it’s because it’s absolutely vital to 2025, a much-needed, necessarily discomfiting, and even cathartic real-time processing of one of the US’s most cataclysmic national moments.