3 Women (1977)
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Robert Altman, Patricia Resnick, Shelley Duvall
Produced by Robert Altman, Scott Bushnell, Robert Eggenweiler
Starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Janice Rule, Robert Fortier, Ruth Nelson, John Cromwell, Sierra Pecheur, Craig Richard Nelson
Each misfortune to befall a geriatric spa’s awkward, arrogant attendant (Duvall), the girlish, guileless coworker (Spacek) who alone idealizes her, or a grim, sullenly expectant muralist (Rule) wed to a whilom stuntman (Nelson) permutes their personalities, sequent circumstances and resulting relations in this oneiric masterpiece, almost as dimly depicted as dreams from which it was conceived. For his distinguishing empowerment of leads with creative carte blanche, Altman’s best movies succeed by the strength of their innovation and intuition, and worst fail for a want thereof. Duvall indued to her obtusely oblivious oddball and Spacek her apparently artless adulator nearly their every peculiarity, extemporarily creating their eccentrics in each transformational, scantly scripted stage — an accomplishment as tremendous for its histrionic invention as the realization of roles that might’ve played as caricature. These personations and a peppered plentitude of cunning little thematic, often auguring metaphors illustrate the potential fluctuancy of ipseity, divides spanning philauty from reality, how social compartmentalism follows personal congenialities, and ostracization begets hubris and aggravates anomaly among gesellschaft and gemeinschaft alike in sun-baked Palm Springs, its very deserts denoting desolation. Engulfed by hydrous signification, this funny, flurrying ornament of New Hollywood’s latitude is richer with each screening, and the last, best, most immersive and penetrating picture of Altman’s winning streak.
Recommended for a double feature paired with Persona, Images or Mulholland Drive.
Tag: Janice Rule
Sublime: Missing
Missing (1982)
Directed by Costa-Gavras
Written by Thomas Hauser, Costa-Gavras, Donald Stewart, John Nichols
Produced by Edward Lewis, Mildred Lewis, Peter Guber, Jon Peters, Terence Nelson
Starring Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek, John Shea, Melanie Mayron, Charles Cioffi, Janice Rule, David Clennon, Richard Bradford, Keith Szarabajka, Joe Regalbuto, Richard Venture
A tragic mystery associative to purges executed in the aftermath of a military putsch in unidentified Chile assumes a familial dimension when a curmudgeonly businessman (Lemmon) rendezvous with the wife (Spacek) of his son, an inquisitive filmmaker and freelance correspondent (Shea) who’s suddenly vanished without trace or report. With the aid of his surviving friends (Mayron, Szarabajka), ingratiatory consuls (Clennon, Doolittle), a few eyewitnesses and an investigative presswoman (Rule), their inquiry unveils both the ultimate fate of their kin and extent of the U.S. State Department’s intergovernmental complicity and obscurantism. Costa-Gavras’ skillful coalescence of interpersonal drama and political conspiracy is no less carking or captivating here for its moneyed polish than in his French pictures: graphic reenactments of Pinochet’s sanguineous coup, the ructions and hecatombs of its tyrannic wake and a personal percontation prosecuted in homes, hospitals, an embassy and a charnel house in the Greek dissident’s peak picture hit as hard as any he’s fashioned, swelled by one of Vangelis’ best synthesized scores. Neither did he forfeit any of his trademark craft or subtlety, demonstrating both innocent and deliberate contrarieties between account and actuality with cutbacks and narrations that further obfuscate the means by which the irrevocable’s committed. Heading an invariably terrific cast, Lemmon and Spacek are superb, slowly and credibly transitioning from an adversarial to affectionate relation as the former’s reproving yet principled father bonds with his daughter-in-law, perceives in his son’s output his total substance, and realizes himself as naif for his initial credulity regarding his government’s integrity as was his boy in the conviction that American identity is unconditionally salvational. Almost as unsettling as the outdoor omnipresence of soldiers, public plentiousness of cadavers and stridence of gunshots and helicopters conducing a miasmic evocation, Venture and Cioffi unnerve as an ambassador whose geniality turns to glacial severity and a creepily underhanded Navy captain, as does Bradford as a deviously obscure military operative, and one of the lost individual’s last known interlocutors. As an allegorical denunciation of both the Pinochean junta and their American allies, and history of a pathetic incident, Gavras’ most proclaimed feature also emphasizes a caveat of conduct: in an event of martial law, inquisition is less risky than suicidal.