The Great Movies III

The plot can be summarized in a few words, or endlessly. The rich playboy Lennox asks Marlowe to drive him to Tijuana. Marlowe does, and is questioned by the cops and jailed after Lennox's wife is found beaten to death. Released by the cops after Lennox's suicide in Mexico, Marlowe is visited by the gangster Marty Augustine and his goons. Augustine thinks Marlowe has money Lennox was carrying. In one of the most shocking moments in movie history, he commits an act of cruelty and says, "Now that's someone I love. Think what could happen to you."

Marlowe follows him to the Malibu beach house of the writer Roger Wade and his wife, Eileen, and is later hired by Eileen to track down Roger after he runs away to a shady drying-out sanitarium. How are Lennox, the Wades, and Augustine connected? I don't think the answer to that question concerns Altman nearly as much as the look and feel of the film. He wants to show a private eye from the noir era blundering through a plot he is perhaps too naive to understand. The movie's visual strategy underlines his confusion. Altman and his cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, "flashed" the color film with carefully calculated extra light, to give it a faded, pastel quality, as if Marlowe's world refuses to reveal vivid colors and sharp definition. Most of the shots are filmed through foregrounds that obscure: panes of glass, trees and shrubbery, architectural details, all clouding Marlowe's view (and ours). The famous Altman overlapping dialogue gives the impression that Marlowe doesn't pick up on everything around him. Far from resenting the murkiness in his world, Marlowe repeats the catchphrase "It's all right with me."The line was improvised by Gould, and he and Altman decided to use it throughout the story as an ironic refrain.

There is another refrain: the title theme, which is essentially the only music heard in the film. Altman uses it again and again, with many different performers (even a Mexican marching band, with the sheet music pinned to the shirt of the man in front of them). At Boulder, the musician Dave Grusin, who worked on the film, told us Altman gathered a group of musicians on a sound stage and had them spend an evening playing around with different arrangements of the song. Why did Altman only use the one song? I've heard a lot of theories, of which the most convincing is that it amused him.

The visuals and sound undergo a shift after the suicide of Roger Wade. There is a scene on the beach where Marlowe pesters people with questions and accuses them of dishonesty; he sounds like a child, a drunk, or both. But then color begins to saturate the pale visuals, the foregrounds no longer obscure, characters start talking one at a time, and finally in the vivid sunlight of Mexico, Marlowe is able to see and hear clearly, and act decisively.

Casting is crucial in film noir, because the actors have to arrive already bearing their fates. Altman's actors are as unexpected as they are inevitable. Sterling Hayden, a ravaged giant, roars and blusters on his way to his grave. As his wife, Altman cast Nina Van Pallandt, then famous as the mistress of Clifford Irving, author of the celebrated fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. She could act, but she did more than act, she embodied a Malibu beach temptress. Mark Rydell, the director, seems to be channeling Martin Scorsese's verbal style in a performance that uses elaborate politeness as a mask for savagery. And Elliott Gould is a Marlowe thrust into a story where everybody else knows their roles. He wanders clueless and complaining, and then suddenly understands exactly what he must do.

The Long Goodbye should not be anybody's first film noir, nor their first Altman movie. Most of its effect comes from the way it pushes against the genre, and the way Altman undermines the premise of all private eye movies, which is that the hero can walk down mean streets, see clearly, and tell right from wrong. The man of honor from 1953 is lost in the hazy narcissism of 1973, and it's not all right with him.

agnolia is a film of sadness and loss, of lifelong bitterness, of children harmed, and adults destroying themselves. As the narrator tells us near the end, "We may be through with the past, but the past is never through with us." In this wreckage of lifetimes, there are two figures, a policeman and a nurse, who do what they can to offer help, hope, and love.

That may not be the Magnolia you recall. It was not quite the film I recalled, either, and now that I have seen it again, my admiration has only deepened. On its release in 1999, our focus was perhaps distracted by the theme of coincidence, the intersecting storylines, and above all the astonishing coup with which Paul Thomas Anderson ended his film. Nor was the film a melancholy dirge; it was entertaining, even funny, always fascinating.