I wish that Ron Mann’s affectionate but inch-deep Altman was the great documentary biography that Robert Altman warrants, but it isn’t. Mann’s biopic would make a fine accompanying documentary to my fantasy box set of The Complete And Utter Works Of Robert Altman, and its use of clips from a solid majority of the director’s movies makes it a mouth-watering appetiser for anyone eager to reacquaint themselves with the master’s entire oeuvre. Sadly, its main effect is repeatedly to seize the viewer with the urge to press eject and slot in any one of the Altman movies invoked – major or minor (still a fluid distinction) – and watch the real thing in lieu of the largely third-hand and obvious insights here gathered.
To be sure, we are granted fresh glimpses into less well-covered areas of Altman’s half-century career – particularly his early apprenticeship as a maker of industrial shorts and episodic television in the 1950s and 60s – then the lean years of low-budget, small-cast theatrical adaptations that Altman made after the 1970s went sour on him (as they did for almost all the pacesetting Hollywood Renaissance directors; Popeye, though reassessed far more positively since its calamitous release in 1980, was at the time seen as Altman’s Heaven’s Gate).
Of his two great periods of creative activity, the era between M*A*S*H* and A Wedding, and from 1992’s The Player to his death in 2005, little is said that we haven’t heard or read before, particularly in Mitchell Zuckoff’s exemplary 2009 oral biography Robert Altman, which featured everyone, including Altman himself from beyond the grave.
The Altman biopic I’d like to see one day would have more in common with the director’s own wandering eye. We’d hear less from Bruce Willis and more from longstanding, lower-rung members of his repertory company. I bet Paul Dooley, Bert Remsen, John Schuck, David Arkin and Henry Gibson would have had much more to offer than stale recitations of “genius”, “maverick”, and “one of a kind”. And avoiding the catch-all, slavishly chronological approach that Mann adopts might lend us a better sense of how even the most forgotten reaches of Altman’s career hold wonders we have long persuaded ourselves not to bother with. He worked with everyone from Lillian Gish to Lindsay Lohan; he took entire genres apart and made his own machines of them; he inspired former collaborators such as Alan Rudolph and Christopher Guest to make movies, even whole new genres, of their own; and above all created a never-ending, 40-year-long party-parade of a career that today feels more like one single magnificent movie.
By all means, use Mann’s movie as a sampler, an appetite-whetter, because that’s how it functions best. For real depth, go to the movies themselves. They are one man’s American monolith, eternal and indestructible.
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Altman is released in the UK on Friday 3 April
