“Secret Honor” (1984)
You have to go back pretty far in Altman’s career to find a film half as austere as “Secret Honor,” and he certainly never made one quite like it again. In contrast to his trademark expansive ensemble casts and characters who cover a wide swath of terrain, “Secret Honor” is about one man in one room over the course of one night. That the man in question is former disgraced American president Richard Nixon —portrayed with majestic frailty and grace by Philip Baker Hall— makes the film intensely involving from start to finish. Filmed at the University of Michigan, where Altman was teaching film at the time, “Secret Honor” is raw, cloistered, clammy, alive with paranoia and miles away from the rambling humanism that defines Altman as a filmmaker. Yet the camera still roves like a predatory bird, capturing every incriminating detail, and his ear for the toxic poetry of Nixon’s speech chills to the bone, especially as delivered in Hall’s eerily assured performance. It’s a film that’s at once an anomaly in its director’s filmography, but is also so singular and so precise that it feels completely true to intentions that Altman gave little vent to elsewhere. [B+]
“Fool For Love” (1985)
One of Sam Shepard’s greatest plays (a Pulitzer Prize-winner that was recently revived on Broadway with Sam Rockwell and Nina Arianda) finds itself in sturdy enough hands with Altman’s screen adaptation — the film never transcends its origins but doesn’t mess it up either. Backed somewhat unexpectedly by B-movie specialist studio Cannon Films, it tracks the reunion of former lovers Eddie (Shepard himself) and May (Kim Basinger) in a Southwestern motel. As we learn from Harry Dean Stanton’s Old Man, the pair are actually siblings, fathered by their bigamous patriarch, and the discovery of their relationship causes Eddie’s mother to kill herself. More successfully than in some of Altman’s other stage adaptations of this period, ‘Fool’ finds Altman cementing a really compelling visual approach, past and present bleeding into one another and nicely capturing the ghostly Greek tragedy vibe of the play. The performances are strong, with Basinger —known best as a Bond Girl at the time— emerging as the standout, finding reserves that would mostly go untapped until “L.A. Confidential.” It’s almost as good an adaptation as you can imagine, but unlike some plays that change mediums effortlessly, the crackling energy of the source material remains just out of reach: it’s an inherently theatrical piece and one that cinema struggles to capture. [B]
“O.C. and Stiggs” (1987)
If Altman thought that that making a studio teen sex comedy based on National Lampoon stories would be his way to back to commercial and critical success, he was proven sadly mistaken: “O.C. and Stiggs” was a widely derided disaster that spent four years on the shelf. Like basically every Altman movie, there’s more of interest here than first meets the eye, but for the most part, its poor reputation is earned. Writers Ted Mann and Tod Carroll had created the characters, a pair of malevolent Arizona teens, for National Lampoon in the 1970s, and Mann adapted their tales into an MGM movie that saw O.C (Daniel H. Jenkins) and Stiggs (Neill Barry) tormenting the wealthy, racist Schwab family. Altman would later defend the film as a satire of obnoxious “Animal House”-style comedies rather than the real deal, and occasionally the film brushes against something anarchic and subversive that shows what a truly great Altman teen pic would look like. And the cast (at least beyond the monumentally unappealing leads) try to have fun, with Jane Curtin, a young Cynthia Nixon and Martin Mull emerging as standouts. But you have to be really, really generous to the film to find it anything other than smug, spiteful and shitty to women and gay people. If that wasn’t Altman’s intention, then something clearly went wrong in the execution. [D]
“Beyond Therapy” (1987)
Another film often deemed to be among Altman’s worst (and yet another 1980s stage adaptation from the filmmaker), “Beyond Therapy” is never quite as bad as such, but it’s definitely a film that proves to be far less than the sum of its parts. Those parts are pretty good: Christopher Durang’s play, about a bisexual man (Jeff Goldblum), the neurotic woman he meets through a lonely hearts ad (Julie Hagerty), their messed-up psychiatrists (Tom Conti and Glenda Jackson) and Goldblum’s male lover (Christopher Guest), is a well loved farce-tinged stage comedy. And much of the cast here are perfect for their roles, with Goldblum, Hagerty and Jackson all proving terrific (Conti’s a little over the top, and Guest plays a gay stereotype that would likely be the subject of protests today). But Altman cranks the wackiness dial all the way up, with the more emotionally nuanced elements of the play being trampled on, and the film doesn’t seem to share much affinity for the rhythms of the play (Durang more or less disowned the movie). While fitfully funny and visually often striking (if nothing else, Altman successfully opens it up), the end result feels tin-eared more often than not. [C-]
“Vincent and Theo” (1990)
“An obsessive vision. A desperate dream. A world that didn’t understand… And a brother that did.” Originally meant to be a four-hour BBC miniseries, Altman trimmed the Julian Mitchell-written script about Vincent van Gogh and his brother down to 2½ hours to release as a feature. It is a traditional biopic in many ways, and is probably closer to the previous work of Mitchell (the screenwriter behind “Another Country,” “Wilde,” and episodes from various 1970s British mini-series biopics), than to Altman’s, though not without some flourishes. The film centers on Tim Roth as Vincent and Paul Rhys as his art dealer brother Theodore, and proves to be virtually a two-hander, and all the true-story beats are there —from Theo supporting Vincent’s art to Theo’s marriage to Vincent’s infamous ear episode. But what makes it stand out from other tortured artist biopics is Altman’s mastery in mapping van Gogh’s madness onto his genius and Jean Lepine‘s painterly camerawork, which brings the artist’s work to life. One of Altman’s most accessible films, “Vincent and Theo” is an outlier in his filmography, but very much a worthwhile one. Interesting factoid: art students painted the van Gogh reproductions in the film, saving on production costs. [B]
