Short Cuts

“Multiple storytelling has always interested me. The audience is always carrying the story they’ve left in their minds, so there’s an ever-present sense of lives going on. Even if you’re looking in this window, what’s happening over here is continuing. That’s the achievement, the discovery in it, I think.” — Robert Altman

An adaptation of Raymond Carver short stories, Short Cuts weaves between 8 or 9 overlapping storylines and 22 characters crisscrossing over the film’s 188 minutes. It’s a bleak portrait of claustrophobic lives and dead-end relationships: a couple whose child is in a coma after a hit-and-run accident; the husband who can’t get over his wife’s one-night stand; the woman who gets a kick out of her hubbie’s bare-faced lies. Alcoholism and the battle between the sexes figure large. For all that, the movie’s emotionalism is raw and funny, it’s a teeming, caustic and compassionate human comedy; a singularly astringent, often cynical view of America and Americana. Just as Nashville encapsulated the drift of the mid 1970s, Short Cuts distills the pre-millenial mood.

The Great American Novel that no one could ever write turned out to be a film.

Gore Vidal

It’s a funny/scary vision, with a manic edge — which is why, when you come down from the high of the filmmaking, you may be left with the taste of ashes in your mouth. Altman’s artistry can make you happy even when his art offers cold comfort.

David Ansen, Newsweek

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