Brewster McCloud

Brewster McCloud

dir. Robert Altman

Harry Potter and the Pantsless Eyelashes

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

January 18, 2007 - 35mm/IFC Center

Brewster McCloud is the motion picture debut of the talented and sexy Shelley Duvall. Brewster McCloud is the first motion picture featuring Bud Cort as the titular character; his next would be Harold of Harold and Maude. Brewster McCloud is likely to be (cannot be too sure about this) the only movie where a serial killer leaves bird shit on the bodies. Brewster McCloud is often incredibly funny and irreverent. Brewster McCloud is like M*A*S*H in that an incredibly long action/sporting scene cuts the movie’s sails and brings it to a rather tedious dead halt. Unlike M*A*S*H, this scene is not the climax of the story or the humor, and the movie is forced to struggle to recover (in M*A*S*H, the movie ends). This is a tricky situation that only occurs when a movie is actually genuinely funny, filled to the brim with sillybilly belly laughs. The laughter becomes the norm, and in this case, a long sequence that is unfunny feels far worse than an unfunny scene in a marginally funny movie. The tragedy I speak of is a very long “funny” car chase sequence, shot in characteristic Altman fashion, meaning long shots zooming in and out at a whim, which cause the life-size cars to appear almost like match-box cars. The hyper-kinetic energy of the rest of the movie is reduced to watching a four-year-old play with toys. It is frustrating, because otherwise, Brewster McCloud is classic Altman and a comedy classic. Instead it has been reduced to a mere oddity, but it is so much more, so so much more.

Brewster McCloud bolts out of the gate with a false start and then gets chugging along at a relentless pace. It beings with a woman singing a dreadful rendition of the Star Spangled Banner in the Houston Astrodome. The credits roll over the thing, but the arrogant woman stops singing, berates the band for being out of key and then both the song and the credits start over again (false start). Soon we’re jettisoned to Stacey Keach in old man make-up. He is collecting money from nursing homes. Eventually, Mr. Keach goes careening down a hill in his wheelchair. He hollers quite a bit, very much like (or exactly like) Spike Jonze in the below clip from Jackass: The Movie.

It comes after Wee-Man in the Cone

These scenes are intercut with scenes that are even more non-sequitor. Rene Auberjonois plays a high=strung, hypo-allergenic ornithologist. He lectures fun and not-so-fun facts about birds to the camera, which are always funny (sadly, the frequency of his appearances slow as the movie moves forward). Very quickly a detective is brought in from San Francisco to investigate the bird shit murders. This detective specializes in turtleneck sweaters, and is played by Michael Murphy, who wears piercing ocean blue contact lenses (this is all introduced in the midst of the relentless pace part).

All of this overkill funny leads to what? Does it need to lead to anything? Part of the beauty of Brewster McCloud is the amount of clutter in every frame, clutter or detail, something fans of Wes Anderson may find familiar and comforting. Altman also embraces something that has since become something of a Wes Anderson fixture, which is framing a person or action in the center of widescreen frame, while a cluttered background or oddball action surrounds.

Robert Altman started making movies not as a young man, but as an adult, yet Brewster feels the work of a young, enthused director. The anarchic sunshine that is this picture has a twang of melancholy, but it is first and foremost a whacky comedy. The cherub-faced Mr. Cort is building wings to fly away and become something of a true cherub. Wearing a pair of skimpy briefs, Brewster, with an uncherub-like, sweaty, muscular body does chip-ups. A friend, who works at the local health food store, delivers his order of human bird food, if you can imagine what that is. This girl is just overcome with sexual attraction to this to-be-winged man. Sex is the last thing on Mr. McCloud’s mind, but the gal is willing to take care of things herself. It is one of the funnier scenes in the movie as the girl writhes under covers on Brewster’s bed and he is ardently oblivious. Shelley Duvall is more successful in her seduction, shifting Brewster’s focus just a tiny bit away from flying. His idealist passion to fly away is discovered to be malleable, making Brewster McCloud a coming-of-age story. It is not about sexual awakening, but about dreams and youthful idealism quietly breaking with the influence of the real world and human frailty. Sex is presented as something frail and human, not corrupting. Though Brewster builds himself to be an organic flying machine, like a bird, his avian ideology stumbles a bit with every touch of humanity. Though the movie is not sad and human frailty is celebrated, despite the lost idealism. It would take a man of Altman’s history and stature to communicate this, particularly through comedy, and with its flaws and humanity, Brewster McCloud will be rediscovered and cherished.

Thieves Like Us

Thieves Like Us

dir. Robert Altman

Young love. Keechie and Bowie.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
January 9, 2007 - 35mm/IFC Center

They’re like us! Three bank robbers escape from a Depression era Mississippi prison to continue robbing banks. Thieves Like Us is a bank robber movie without very much bank robbing. Every once and a while we see a stack of cash and, if we’re good, we see the inside of a bank. For the most part, we see the kitchen, bedroom, porch and dining room. When any number of these rooms are occupied by a young actress named Shelley Duvall all thoughts of gun fighting, car chases and Bonnie and Clyde banjo hijinks take a back seat. Ms. Duvall plays Keechie (the movie is peppered with such names as Bowie, Chicamaw and T-Dub), a virginal farm gal.

In a typical crime narrative, Keechie falls for a roughneck youth, turned on by his recklessness. In Thieves Like Us, Keechie falls for Bowie, another simpleton, who just happens to make ends by robbing banks. For those who remember Keith Carradine as the smiling cowpoke who meets a chilly demise in McCabe in Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us acts as a smiley spin-off (what happened to this smiling goofball between this movie and Nashville that turned him into the man’s man that would go on to play Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok is beyond me). Neither Carradine nor Duvall can keep an elated smile off their face when together. This device matched with Duvall’s commanding physical presence and enormous star-filled eyes make for some serious chemistry. Bowie smiles aw shucks and Keechie returns the smile one hundred bushels over. Shelley Duvall is sexy.

Shelley Duvall is not he the only woman in this picture who delivers a star-making performance and eventually gives a career best performance opposite Jack Nicholson, only to have typecasting effectively ruin the rest of her career. Enter Louise Fletcher, who plays Mattie, the sister-in-law of one of the trio of crooks. Like Nurse Ratched, Mattie is a rock. With a husband in prison and a couple rambunctious youngsters, she has the presence of a high school principal, exuding a maturity that is silencing to adults and children alike. At the same time, unlike Nurse Ratched, she is compassionate and loved and respected. In the final scenes, when Thieves Like Us, when it gives in to its genre conventions and makes a bombastic exit, Fletcher and Duvall share numerous scenes together and it becomes clear what Milos Forman and Stanley Kubrick saw in these fantastic actresses.

Set in 1937 during The American Depression, the soundtrack is jam-packed with radio waves. Believe it or not, Robert Altman was 12 years old in 1937, and he brings his first-person perspective by flooding scenes with the echoes of radio plays and news reports rumbling about "The New Deal,” rather than music. The effect is sometimes silly and distracting, particularly underscoring an intimate scene between Keechie and Bowie. This brand of “comedy” permeates the scenes between the three bank robbers, almost like a far, far less funny Raising Arizona. All the same, Thieves Like Us is not a comedy. It is a serious movie about young love and domesticity. There’s just a bit too much bank robbing in it, even though there isn’t much. It’s like buck shot, and only a few pellets hit the heart. The rest is just buried in your elbow and upper arm. That’s just annoying. Kill me Altman, like I know you can.