Short Cuts (1993)

I count several of the stories in Cathedral, by Raymond Carver, among the best I've ever read. One of them, "A Small, Good Thing," even won the 1983 O. Henry Prize. This is the one story I already knew, the one that's most prominent in Altman's film adaptation, and it features Bruce Davison and Andie MacDowell as parents to a boy who's been hit by a car. It's among the more filmable stories that were chosen (Altman took eight, from more than one of Carver's collections, plus a poem), but it's one of the worst acted... until Jack Lemmon turns up. The Frances McDormand-Tim Robbins-Madeline Stowe love triangle might have showcased the best work, filmed as it was at the very moment all three came into their own, and the couple dynamic that Chris Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh manage is notable as well, as are Robert Downey Jr. and Lili Taylor. But why focus so much on the acting? Look at the cast! This is one of the biggest, best, and (Huey Lewis??) bravest ensembles of my lifetime, if not of all time, and it's worth noting that the Golden Globes gave the group a special award for its performance. I trust that all of these talents signed on for the simple reason that Carver is an American legend. Like Altman's, his stories are ram-packed with subtleties, and attempting to carry them onto the screen - with the requisite simplification or exaggeration - must have been daunting for the director, not to mention an exciting challenge for the actors. Unfortunately, I'm of the opinion that the experiment failed. What Altman does to keep the movie going - with varying success - is a simple trick in which he interconnects the various stories. So, going back to the boy who was hit by the car, the woman driving (an excellent Lily Tomlin) is a waitress married to a drunk (Tom Waits) in a different storyline. The boy and his parents live beside a teenaged cellist with a bad relationship with her lounge-singing mother, which makes another storyline, (and so on like this). Interconnectedness is a reasonable approach, given that Carver wrote about the hard bits of American life as lived by common people - things that can and do ordinarily happen to any one of us - and I can even employ Edgar Allan Poe's term for what makes a good short story, "unity of impression," in Altman's defense. Each of Carver's stories make a unified impression in their own right, and they do so as a life's work, too. But in attempting to yoke them into one setting (L.A. instead of Carver's usual Pacific Northwest) and one weekend - almost the terms of the classical unities, which required that all action happen in one place and one day - Altman hopes to create this single impression, a sort of "Here's What Ray Carver Was All About" kind of film, during which he takes the viewer on a valuable tour that's a lot more like a big, baggy novel: a plausible sequence full of great dramatic moments. What goes wrong here, though, is that he ignores the fact that these were short stories, forgetting something else that Poe said about the form: you should be able to read it in one sitting. Jumping in and out of these stories, over and over again for more than three hours, is too jarring to allow the viewer to connect with most of characters at any level deeper than the surface, and it compromises the film's potential for that gut-level "whoosh" we've all felt at the end of a great story. When he taught Creative Writing, Carver would famously tell his students, "No tricks!" It's advice Altman would have done well to remember. Jumbling these stories together is a cheap trick that robs each of its individual power, taking eight narratives and turning them into something that barely qualifies as one. I write this days after finally seeing Paul Haggis's Crash, where a similar technique worked much better. In that film, (1h45m, approx.), the sequence of seemingly unrelated events was arranged in a clear, overarching plot. By comparison, Short Cuts leaves you investing a lot for no reward in the end, and forces you to make do with the little brilliant flashes along the way. Then again, maybe that's the point. Maybe that's how film differs from literature. But for my part, I'd much rather that Altman had made an anthology-like film, and tackled each story one at a time. Even better (though not for the box office), if it has to be three hours long, an anthology is something during which you can take breaks, to let each of these powerful stories set in. In the post-network TV environment - the still bright but fading age of the DVD box set - I'd love to see someone take a crack at Carver again, in a way that lets each of his stories do the work they set out to do, and engages the work on its own level, and respeciting that fact that Carver refused to write a novel, "driven toward brevity and intensity" as he claimed to be. (Next writing project: a letter. "Dear HBO," it begins...) By the way, in Canada, three Toronto writers have led the charge all year to declare 2011 "The Year of the Short Story," as challenge to the perception that the short story is a dying medium. If any of the above resonates with you, go to www.yoss2011.com for more short story love.