My Sweet Irascible You

Robert Altman: The Oral Biography
by Mitchell Zuckoff
2009, Knopf


I have a long and storied history with film for my short quarter-century of life. One of the first and longest-lasting of these stories is my admiration for Robert Altman.

Film began to interest me as an artistic medium in sophomore year of high school. At the time, I was incredibly interested in theatre, but living in the suburbs of New England somewhat preempts access to legitimate theatre. Film, I discovered, was an acceptable substitute for my creative cravings. (I should mention that the mother of one of my friends was particularly inspiring and nurturing in my interest in both of these art forms.)

I was waxing nostalgic recently with a colleague about how different the world of the arts was during my adolescent years. The world was full of great possibilities of discovery. For every film I saw, there opened a connection to a vast history of cultural heroes I had not previously been privy to.

When Gosford Park came out in 2001, I had never heard of Robert Altman. I went to see the film with a friend of mine and we sat in the surprisingly crowded theatre in the third row, craning upwards at the period costumes and crying to ourselves over the repressed, yet somehow dignified, lives of the characters on screen.

Oh, how taken was I. The spinning cameras and interlacing dialogue were obviously old hat to the filmmaking world and I had seen their evidence in films and television during my earlier, more oblivious days. But these techniques were completely electrifying. There was nuance in the scraps of dialogue Altman threw his audience as he camera brushed past the characters.

Altman's camera hovered at a distance, providing a distance from the action that made it easy for the audience to make judgments on the characters, to know them as constructs; yet, paradoxically, the camera's distance made the characters more real as well. When the camera would grace a character with a tighter, more intimate framing it revealed their essential humanity and tantalized me with the icebergian hint of depth below those waters. Like the people I knew in my life, his characters were real but not fully revealed. Their inner lives were present, but obscured by the minutiae of life.

Mitchell Zuckoff's incredibly affecting, affectionate Robert Altman: An Oral Biography paints Altman himself in a similar way through the virtue of its "oral biography" conceit and creates a beautifully suggestive portrait of Altman as a man and as an artist while maintaining some element of distance.

The book began as a traditional biography and Zuckoff spent several months interviewing Altman for the project. After Altman's death, the book was refocused to incorporate anecdotes and commentary by the dozens (and dozens) of actors who appeared in his films as well as his family, war buddies, producers and others in a manner similar to Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. or Live from New York (the SNL oral history).

What is interesting about reading an oral biography is justifying the lapses in memory that time necessitates. Several of the accounts here contradict each other. If there is any specific flaw in Zuckoff's book, it's that in the case of discrepancies that cast negatived light on someone (Warren Beatty, for example), the target is given the last word to essentially contradict those who spoke before him.

The conceit of asking dozens of artists to characterize a man based on their brief experiences with him brings us closer to Altman and yet, like the characters in his films, further away. The reminiscences are amalgamated together as one reads the book and Altman becomes a difficult figure to pin down.

Some of the anecdotes and tributes are incredibly intimate and these tend to take place in moments of privacy between Altman and a colleague. When it comes to perspectives on Altman working with a group, the interviewees paint the same portrait of his gruffness, his antiauthoritarianistic tendencies and his egoism. These memories are recalled alternately with like-minded admiration and condoning apologies.

The interviewees seem to be suggesting in their frank admissions of his irascibility and their fond recollections of intimate moments of affection that, essentially, Altman was a difficult, bullying figure who had hidden depths of sensitivity in his relations with loved ones and artists under his tutelage.

His relationship with his wife, in particular, demonstrates this dynamic. Altman womanized behind her back but was also her biggest champion and adored her. Kathryn Altman is portrayed as such a fiercely-independent woman that, given her awareness of the affairs, it would seem she did not leave Altman because of some private vulnerability he showed her.

Altman's films would seem to bear this perspective out and Altman himself repeatedly suggests in the book that he is, in fact, his films.

In films like Nashville and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Altman's worldview is a caustic, cynical one. But what makes these (and, by and large, all his) films so quintessential to the American canon is that they are not so entirely one-minded in this perspective. His characters are flawed to mirror the flaws of society, but Altman largely forgives their flaws and chooses to populate these films with lovingly idiosyncratic characterizations.

A perfect example of this dichotomy between cynicism and tenderness is Altman's Short Cuts, based on the work of the brilliant brilliant brilliant Raymond Carver and also my favorite of his films.

Nashville presented a country at a moral crisis, tinted by Altman's cynical and satiric viewpoint, but Short Cuts questions that cynicism. The worldview contained in Short Cuts is not an overtly optimistic one, by far. There are deaths and betrayals and Carver's small tragedies of life, but this view of life is tempered by an optimism that suggests that not every tragic situations must end tragically and not every cruel actions must correspond to a cruel heart. In this way, the characters and the plots of Short Cuts come to represent a more multi-faceted view of life, one that considers its shortcomings alongside its pleasures. With this film, Altman does not suggest that his worldview in Nashville was incorrect; he acknowledges society's selfishness, ignorance and cruelty. But with Short Cuts, he points to the counter-examples, suggesting that these varying perspectives of optimism and cynicism all occupy, after all, the same world.

The above quote comes from a paper I wrote in 2006 in film school. The class was an examination of the work of Jon Jost, whose brilliant but difficult films represented independent filmmaking, and of Altman, whose brilliant but accessible films were erected as a straw man by my brilliant but close-minded professor to demonstrate the false paradigm of indie filmmaking in Hollywood.

Altman was a Hollywood filmmaker who worked if not with indie budgets then with indie spirit. Altman mortgaged his house by my count three times to finance his films and is routinely broke throughout the biography. Altman's greatest contributions to cinema are truly independent-minded innovations like his trademark over-lapping dialogue and the use of zoom lenses.

The greatest achievement of Zuckoff's book is not in its attempt to create a portrait of the elusive, irascible Mr. Altman but in reproducing Altman's zeal for filmmaking. The anecdotes throughout the book, particularly those related to Popeye and McCabe, have the effect of inspiring awe in the reader simply by sharing, through the interview subjects, the awe Altman inspired in his collaborators.

Altman's seat-of-your-pants organic stick-it-to-the-man brash filmmaking is, in every sense of the word, exhilarating to hear tell of.

In writing this entry, I truly had to restrain myself from writing all the things I wanted to discuss. If given the space, I could very easily have written an entry three times as long discussing further Altman's independent-leanings, the nature of his idiosyncratic camera, his supposed misogyny, his reluctant role as father, and his identification with his work as well as the numerous truly delightful anecdotes about his methods of filming.

Zuckoff's book has truly reinvigorated by admiration for Robert Altman, both his role as artist and his artistic output.