April 16, 2003

By Robert Avila

NOBODY SMOKES POT anymore, or at least nobody likes to admit it, but one of the things I respected most about the 1970s was the honesty with which marijuana was consumed. Pot smoke was so thick, it made bathing or deodorizing virtually unnecessary. People my parents' age would announce, "Yes, I smoke pot. But I don't drink. That's bad for your liver." Or, more likely, they did both interchangeably and thought nothing of it. It's not like it was legal back then, either. But you had to be an enormous square to worry about that.

It was all part of the counterculture, of course, and the mentality of a generation who believed, as Woody Allen put it in Sleeper, "Everything our parents told us is bad for us is good," and vice versa. That generation had some especially compelling reasons to be wary of the establishment's claims to moral authority (the shorthand being the civil rights struggle, the Vietnam War, Watergate). In so scabrous a world it was incumbent on them to be outlaws rather than in-laws.

A great era of American cinema sprang from that outlaw perspective, reflecting, and capturing the attention of, a nation of outsiders. And no one came by this sensibility more naturally than Robert Altman, the Lifetime Achievement in Directing honoree at this year's San Francisco International Film Festival. Altman may have been born a little ahead of the baby boom curve (in 1925), but his inspired research into American culture – beginning with M*A*S*H (1970) and running through such films as McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Thieves Like Us (1974), Nashville (1975), and Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) – placed him squarely in the camp of the "New Hollywood," a flukish and too-short-lived phenomenon, beginning in the late 1960s, that saw the rise of the American auteur within and around the old Hollywood studio system.

The New Hollywood is now the New Old Hollywood – dominated by producers and the blockbuster strategy – but Altman is still very much his own man. Like Woody Allen, or Ingmar Bergman, he has survived by enclosing himself in a semi-independent (but always highly collaborative) practice on the fringes of the industry.

His work has never lost its outlaw perspective; it's integral to our image of an Altman film. Along with the frequently large casts, overlapping dialogue, loose narrative structure, the véritélike zoom lens – the improvisational feeling produced by the inclusion or simulation of chance – Altman's best work offers a relentlessly demythologizing satire of the American system. He's deftly subverted many of the culture's dominant genres (war movies, detective stories, westerns, teen comedy), taking on with almost unfailing good humor America's sacred cows, God and country music among them.

There's a deeply liberating aspect to the antiauthoritarian high jinks in a film like M*A*S*H, still a vital antidote to the militarism of the age. With a Marx Brothers sensibility, it rebuffs all claims by petty and coercive power (even if, or rather especially since, the larger predicament of war and the draft remain inescapable), beating back the colonizing tendrils of the U.S. Army and a handmaiden church. Altman's camera creates a mischievous mélange of quotidian detail, the incidental cruelties, pleasures, and obsessions of life, from which a simple human clarity emerges. Sally Kellerman's regular Army matron chastises Elliot Gould for attending a wounded teen with "Doctor, that man is a prisoner of war," and he fires back, "So are you, sweetheart, you just don't know it."

That's a magic moment in many Altman films: the sudden transparency of reality as the great shibboleths are punctured and sent, like hot-air balloons, ignominiously sputtering to the ground. It's woven into each of the festival's Altman selections. In Tanner '88, originally a 10-part HBO series, Altman regular Michael Murphy plays a presidential candidate whose stint on the campaign trail gradually leads him further from the shores of conviction. A dream match between director Altman and Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau (and the inspiration for Tim Robbins's less interesting Bob Roberts), Tanner brilliantly unfolds against the actual primary races and their real-life candidates. It's a withering, highly addictive satire of beltway politics that stands with Spinal Tap among the most successful mockumentaries. Together with Nashville (1975), another festival offering and roundly considered his masterpiece, the director explores with an infectious mixture of exuberance and melancholy the degeneration of a political culture driven by the primacy of image over substance. (Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, together with 1977's figurative, beautifully made 3 Women, are two of the exceptional festival screenings that demonstrate his stylistic versatility and the limits of the Altman-esque signposts mentioned above.)

It feels like the right moment to be revisiting the Altman oeuvre. Bush is on TV in Baghdad with Arabic subtitles, chaos reigns on the streets of that city, citizens of no government loot government offices, as nearby U.S. soldiers sit in parked tanks. And meanwhile, behind closed doors and half a globe away, the biggest looters wear tailored suits and privately conclude the business of selling off pieces of Iraq. Admittedly, going to an Altman movie may seem a little redundant to those of us who suspect, more than ever, that we're living through one.