Opinion: Robert Altman, R.I.P.

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The legendary director, who had been living with somebody else’s heart following a transplant 11 years ago, is dead at age 81. I was pretty much a 50/50 Altman fan: The good-ol-boy woman-haters comedy of M*AS*H hasn’t aged well for me, and I think of Nashville as a Henry Gibson film more than an Altman film. There’s always been something extremely bogus in Altman’s pose as an outsider from the Hollywood system, and he’s half of an ailment a friend of mine once dubbed ‘Altman-Wenders Syndrome,’ where a person’s later output is so bad it makes you hate the earlier stuff too.

That’s all the bad I’ll say of him, though. Some of those seventies movies are great, and Nashville is the last great location film—by which I mean a film that goes to a place and shows some of the fascinating people, things, and sights you can encounter there. And even with the Altman pictures that don’t do it for me there’s always one or two great things. I could sit through Short Cuts again just for Tom Waits’ ‘You’re the one that’s chippin’ away at our mansion of love, baby!’ (Quoting from memory...) If you’re looking for undervalued Altman you may want to endure his 1979 science fiction picture Quintet, Paul Newman’s answer to Jeremiah Johnson. Or take in his three greatest films from the eighties: Secret Honor, Popeye, and O.C. and Stiggs. Altman was also by most accounts the driving force behind Combat, the rich TV series about World War II grunts, and that’s all available on DVD.