KANSAS CITY
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1996 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: KANSAS CITY is strong on period
atmosphere and is unusual for an Altman film in
that there are relatively few plot strands to tie
together. Jennifer Jason Leigh gives terrific
performance as a very uncommon common woman. While
there are a few too many jazz interludes for most
viewers of the film, the story is rich in texture
and in irony. Rating: +2 (-4 to +4). Warning:
minor plot spoilers. It is tough to tell the
premise of the film without telling a little that
is mysterious in the first half hour of the film.
KANSAS CITY is something of a departure from Robert Altman's recent style of telling many different stories simultaneously, then letting them all come together at the end. In KANSAS CITY he is really back to telling a single story, though it takes a little while for one of the plot threads to be tied into the mainline of the story. In the screenplay which he co-authored with Frank Barhydt, Altman returns to the city of his youth to direct a story about crime, race, class, and politics.
The setting is Kansas City, Missouri, in 1934. Blondie O'Hara (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) is in a real fix. Her husband Johnny (Dermot Mulroney) has robbed a taxicab, using burnt cork to make himself look black. Now the oddly-named Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte), the local crime boss, has Johnny and is going to kill him. Blondie realizes that that she cannot get Seldom to let the man she loves go. Faced with an immovable object she decides to unleash the only irresistible force she knows. She has to convince the local Democratic political machine to go in with its hired muscle to do the job of freeing her husband. And how is she going to convince them to do that? She has a weird scheme to kidnap Carolyn Stilton (Miranda Richardson) the socialite wife of a Democrat high muckimuck (Michael Murphy) and force him to unleash the muscle of the political machine to save her husband. Much of the film is the interplay between Blondie O'Hara and Carolyn Stilton. Meanwhile Johnny O'Hara is a prisoner at the Hey-Hey Club as Seldom Seen plays a cat and mouse game with him.
All this happens to the background strains of the music at the Hey-Hey Club, except when the music is dragged to the foreground and the story-telling drags to a halt. Altman obviously expected that a big part of the show would be to hear the music of current jazz greats playing anachronistically in 1934. His heart was clearly in the right place, but even his telling of the mainline plot is a little slow and deliberate and people who are not fans of jazz may find his use of it in longish interludes excessive. As with many Altman films, the story cannot be fully assessed until the film is over and much of what the film is saying is encompassed in the last five minutes. This is a story of insular people who think they understand each other but who actually have gulfs of race and class separating them more than they realize.
It has taken me a long time to come around on Jennifer Jason Leigh. For a while I have noted that she has done a good job with this role and with that one and never thought much about it. But I really think now I think she is just about the best character actress of her generation. Although it is said more visually than verbally, it is clear that Blondie is a woman absolutely obsessed with films and in particular with Jean Harlow films, since it is suggested that with bleached blond hair she resembles Harlow. From the first moment we see her she is dressed and made up in the style of women of 1930s films. We learn a great deal about Blondie, but Carolyn remains a cipher through much of the film. We are never really sure what she is thinking or if she is thinking under the laudanum haze into which she sinks at every opportunity. It is, of course, good to see Harry Belafonte acting and for much of the film he seems in control of his character. At one point the character seems to run away with him and as he goes off into a babbling tirade about what he is doing, about racism, and about why he disagrees with Marcus Garvey's Back-to-Africa movement. One feels that the plot intended this speech to be more coherent and cogent than it actually came out.
Altman does not so much put period feel into the film as saturate the film in a bath of rich period atmosphere. Though the viewer has to look quick to place the film's exact year, every scene seems to have an exaggerated 1930s feel. Everything looks very 1930s. Whether or not people dressed in real life like Blondie does, she certainly looks like women in 1930s films. Altman slightly disorients his viewers with a non-chronological telling of the story in the early parts of the film. Perhaps he thinks that the early part of his films should be disorienting. In any case, the story-telling becomes much more straightforward once he gets into the meat of the story. While not a perfect film, 1930s Kansas City certainly does a lot more to keep the film interesting than 1990s Los Angeles did for SHORT CUTS. This is the most intriguing Altman film in quite a while. I rate it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
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