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The opening long-lens panorama establishes the drizzly Corot perspective, the camera passes from chain-gang handcar to canoe to jalopy in one 180° pan. (The moon-faced driver with a revolver to his brain and an anecdote about a blistered turtle swiftly secures the timbre of Faulknerian tragicomedy.) Depression-era lifers on the lam in Mississippi, the callow stray (Keith Carradine) and the aging lecher (Bert Remsen) and the explosive bulldog (John Schuck) rattling around the pastoral void. ("A little trouble up the road," mumbles the youngster after a nasty brush with the law, the story of everybody's life.) Ray's They live by Night runs on fatalistic romanticism, Robert Altman's version is less noir fever than wry, drifting reverie. The drama is mostly resolved offscreen, the true tension is between the screen's patina of offhand naturalism and the soundtrack's running commentary pieced from period radio programs. The theatrical organ notes and gunfire from Gangbusters are deflated by a leisurely bank robbery seen from the outside, soused crooks playact with bored children while The Shadow wonders what evil lurks in the hearts of men. The raw and the self-conscious harmonize in the bashful rhythms of the courtship between Carradine's rangy fugitive and the mechanic's gawky daughter (Shelley Duvall): Surrounded by walls papered with peeling song sheets while vulgarized Shakespeare fills the airwaves, the spooning couple enjoy a moment of sustained luminosity on the margins of the margins. American past with a Gallic eye, as in Bonnie and Clyde but with impressionistic light instead of nouvelle vague laceration. (Penn's slow-mo is basically lampooned in the climax, purposely overdone and filmed from the wrong angle.) Altman loves outlaw-dreamers, yet knows that for them in the end there's only the quilt caked with blood and mud and the train station's vacant staircase. Cinematography by Jean Boffety. With Louise Fletcher, Ann Latham, and Tom Skerritt.
--- Fernando F. Croce |