Altman’s career was
somewhat on the wane before the one-two punch of The Player and Short Cuts
re-established his critical integrity and reintroduced him to another
generation of film school dramatists eager to impress their own brand of
ensemble dramaturgy upon the silver screen. The latter movie in particular — available in a sterling
two-disc set from Criterion that also
includes a small bound copy of the Raymond Carver writings upon which it is based — remains one of my favorites of the director’s canon.

Short Cuts’ setting is the dreary, dystopian,
pesticide-drenched Los Angeles of the early 1990s, and it concentrates on the
interconnected lives of 10 scattered and very different families and individuals,
including Matthew Modine’s doctor and his self-centered artist wife Julianne
Moore (above, in a rightfully acclaimed performance); Moore’s screen sister Madeleine
Stowe and her philandering cop husband, played by Tim Robbins; alcoholic limo
driver Tom Waits; pesticide pilot Peter Gallagher (The OC); children’s party clown Anne Archer; and a trio of bonding
fishermen played by Fred Ward, Buck Henry and Huey Lewis. Any further
distillation of the myriad connections between characters or even the fashion
in which their relationships play out is secondary to the cumulative effect.

A
cinematic collagist at heart (making this movie’s slivered heart teaser poster, later replicated for its DVD release, especially
appropriate), Altman has always had a deft touch crafting thematic tone poems
from multiple, digressive narratives. Short
Cuts, however, is his crowning achievement in this arena. The overarching
subject under the microscope is the innately human frailty of trust, honesty
and fidelity. The resultant portrait that emerges may certainly not be one of uplift — like
Los Angeles’ sun, it somehow feels
both warm and unforgiving at the same time, often within the same scene — but it
is absolutely, unflinchingly real and affecting.