THE PLAYER
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
THE PLAYER is a film directed by Robert Altman and written by Michael Tolkin, based on his novel. It stars Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Whoopi Goldberg, Fred Ward, Brion James, Peter Gallagher, Cynthia Stevenson, Vincent D'Onofrio, Dean Stockwell, Richard E. Grant, Lyle Lovett, Sydney Pollack, with dozens of cameos. Rated R for profanity, mature themes.
THE PLAYER opens with a witty and self-mocking "homage" to the long tracking shot that opens Orson Welles's TOUCH OF EVIL, an even longer, equally amazing tracking shot that scans an unnamed Hollywood studio and introduces the major players by eavesdropping on the busy conversations, especially the writers pitching their stories to Tim Robbins playing Griffin Mill, enfant terrible on his way out. In the process, we also start the endless and fascinating succession of cameos that help give this movie its inside/outside/upside/downside mixture of flick and documentary as we encounter Buck Henry, the writer of THE GRADUATE, pitching a sequel, and Altman's protege Alan Rudolph pitching a "politely political psychic thriller with heart ... GHOST meets THE MANCHURIAN."
Before the movie is over, Altman and Tolkin have pitched the idea of the movie to us, the very story we've just seen. It is a dazzling bright and cynical satire, if either shallow or accurate; in the self-referant, self-absorbed Hollywood atmosphere of the film, it is might hard to know the dancer from the dance, the satire or the thing being satirized. For example, what about the character of Greta Scacchi? Like so many Hollywood women, this one is all surface with no past, no future apart from her relationship to her man or men. Are you going to be satisfied by the ending? It is blunt and counters a lot of rules. You may like that, its cynicism,, its wit, its realpolitik, as it were, or you may feel cheated.
I think you will like Altman's direction. He has returned to the multi-leveled, half-improvised conversations, the imaginative camera work, the witty references. For one example, Altman shows us a plein air breakfast meeting with Burt Reynolds and someone else talking at one table in the foreground while the mike concentrates on the background conversation of Robbins and his boss (Brion James); the camera shoots through the gap between Reynolds and friend and moves right past them as it closes in on the rear table. When Robbins leaves, the camera pulls, the mike pulls back, and Reynolds is still talking. Did I explain this at all understandably? No matter, really, when you see it, you will recognize and, I assume, admire it.
For another example, there's a big charity party and one of those Hollywood TV reporters commenting over the hubbub of the crowd and the camera shows an amazing collection of recognizable faces; we learn this a black-and-white party and there's Cher dressed in red. Carole Lombard gave the first black-and-white Hollywood party in the 1930s and Norma Shearer, the reigning queen, showed up in red; Lombard chewed Shearer out, even though Clark Gable, Lombard's future husband (whom she had met for the first time that night) told her that one did not chew out Norma Shearer, who was married to Irving Thalberg. No one chews out Cher.
THE PLAYER is filled with the constant tug between the history of the Golden Era and the pressures of the current moment. The head of studio security (Fred Ward) praises the old movies (he talks about the Wellesian tracking shot during the Altmanian one), but recognizes no titles after 1950, it seems. The walls are decorated by 30s movie posters. No one has time to go to movies, but they consider how to do without writers altogether.
The individual performances are uniformly excellent. Tim Robbins has never had a better role (except perhaps for the much smaller part in BULL DURHAM). His babyish face makes his ruthlessness all the more alarming. Peter Gallagher plays his rival Larry Levy as a handsome serpent. Vincent D'Onofrio is particularly effective as David Kahane, an angry and not very successful writer. And then there's very strong and heartbreaking performance of Cynthia Stevenson whose fate is by all reports, as well as her performance, painfully accurate.
I also enjoyed the singer Lyle Lovett in a role that was a major comic relief, but I wasn't too pleased with the performance of his partner played by Whoopi Goldberg, not that she's any less than wonderful, but she plays her usual character to such a degree that it hard not to think we're looking at another cameo. In addition to the multitudinous as-themselves appearances (Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts are especially witty and self-parodying), there are many small roles filled admirably. For example, there are Dean Stockwell and Richard E. Grant as the agent-writer team who manage to send up the pieties of the message script with a brilliant sell-out. Then there's Sydney Pollack, the director, playing a lawyer as the very model of detached and charming cynicism.
THE PLAYER is a film of great richness and (perhaps) depth, of admirable technique and successful results. I think that for the critics and film students the question will be to what end was all this brilliance served up. THE PLAYER is so intricately self-referential that I despair of trying to decide whether it is a first-rate satire, a celluloid noose, as Jeff Shannon in the Seattle Times wrote, or whether it is less subversive than it is part of the mainstream it appears to attack. Altman, Tolkin, and their army of stars are the establishment, the Industry, major players who are showing us Hollywood As It Really Is,, acerbically, wittily, the ultimate inside joke, after all. In the film, one character lists the ingredients a successful movie must have: suspense, laughter, hope, heart, nudity, sex. THE PLAYER has all of these, by the strangest of coincidences. I suspect the film is like the worm Ouroboros that swalloweth its own tail, both in structure and intent.
In the meantime, whatever the meaning, cynical or absurdist, THE PLAYER is a great film, as good as Altman has ever made, including M*A*S*H*, NASHVILLE, and McCABE AND MRS MILLER.
I strongly urge you to see THE PLAYER, even at full price.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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