I’m wholly distraught over the death of Robert Altman. If I had to name my top 20 or so films of all time, he’d have directed four of them (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Short Cuts, Nashville, 3 Women).
How spooky that his final work, this summer’s A Prairie Home Companion, is a joyful film about death (of radio, and of people); and how sad that most of its notoriety, in spite of modest box office success, was due to the participation of Lindsay Lohan.
Altman’s honorary Oscar earlier this year - he’d never won Best Director in five tries, finally losing to (shudder) Ron Howard five years ago - came at just the right time, but no award can capture the thrill of watching him work at his peak. No one has ever been better at finding the nuances of human behavior and making them feel profound. Even his misfires (and there were quite a few) aren’t boring.
He created some of the saddest moments in film and some of the funniest, sometimes even in the same scene, and yet never did his work feel manipulative. He found the brilliance in one unexpected actor after another - we probably wouldn’t know much about Julianne Moore if it weren’t for Altman, let alone Shelley Duvall or Elliott Gould.
Even though he was 81 and had admitted to having heart trouble, I feel shocked that I’ve seen my last new Robert Altman movie (so, I’d guess, are Billy Bob Thornton and Hilary Swank, who were scheduled to work with him on Hands on a Hard Body next year) but I’ll cherish his contributions to cinema, and to my DVD collection.
Director Robert Altman dead at age 81 [Reuters]
