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Man is not a bird, posits Makavejev, oh but he is, retorts Robert Altman. To "isolate the dream" is the goal, the method is Ionesco, mostly. A matter of finding "the wrong key," with Margaret Hamilton ushering in the opening credits with a sour "Star-Spangled Banner" and exiting with ruby slippers and a few bars of "Over the Rainbow." Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort), positively larval in floppy shag and striped shirt and round specs, nesting in the bowels of the Houston Astrodome and yearning to fly. His guardian (Sally Kellerman) is the fallen angel with wing scars under her trenchcoat, such foes as the gnarled miser (Stacy Keach) and the racist loudmouth (Bert Remsen) turn up strangled. The whirl of murders and flatfoots and politicos is just so much "bird-shit shit," the "supercop from Frisco" (Michael Murphy) is on the case. "Of greater importance than ever before is the bird's adaptation to the new conditions." A sustained modernist vaudeville, Altman's purest raid on American culture and cinematic convention. Not Pasolini's raven (Uccellacci e uccellini) but a boy's best friend, as Hitchcock would have it, a free-form poem of sex and death precipitated by the tour guide (Shelley Duvall), a breezy dip out of Rivette. Elsewhere the Lecturer (René Auberjonois) grows feathers over the course of the lecture, his notes on the blue-footed booby's mating rituals are followed by a throat-rattling squawk. Details are to be savored: Jennifer Salt's onanistic frenzy during the protagonist's sweaty chin-ups, John Schuck burying his nose in comic-books, mock-Peckinpah editing for mock-car chases. "These are the unnatural facts..." A furious, obnoxious, sublime fairy-tale from an auteur all too aware of how close soaring and crashing are. The concluding circus points up the debt to Fellini, the punchline ponders Peter Pan squashed, "cradle and all." With William Windom, Corey Fisher, G. Wood, Angelin Johnson, and Dean Goss.
--- Fernando F. Croce |