Lyle Lovett | Through the Shattered Lens

Opening with a swarm of helicopters spaying for medflies and ending with an earthquake, 1993’s Short Cuts is a film about life in Los Angeles.

An ensemble piece, it follows several different characters as they go through their own personal dramas. Some of them are married and some of them are destined to be forever single but they’re all living in varying states of desperation. Occasionally, the actions of one character will effect the actions of another character in a different story but, for the most part, Short Cuts is a portrait of people who are connected only by the fact that they all live in the same city. There are 22 principal characters in Short Cuts and each one thinks that they are the star of the story.

Jerry Kaiser (Chris Penn) cleans the pools of rich people while, at home, his wife, Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh), takes care of their baby and works as a phone sex operator. Jerry’s best friend is a makeup artist named Bill (Robert Downey, Jr.) who enjoys making his wife, Honey (Lili Taylor), looks like a corpse so that he can take her picture. One of her photographs is seen by a fisherman (Buck Henry) who has already discovered one actual corpse that weekend. He and his buddies, Vern (Huey Lewis) and Stuart (Fred Ward), discovered a dead girl floating in a river and didn’t report it until after they were finished fishing. (The sight of Vern unknowingly pissing on the dead body is one of the strongest in director Robert Altman’s filmography.)

Stuart’s wife, Claire (Anne Archer), is haunted by Stuart’s delay in reporting the dead body. A chance meeting Dr. Ralph Wyman (Matthew Modine) and his wife, artist Marian (Julianne Moore), leads to an awkward dinner between the two couples. Claire works as a professional clown and Ralph ends up wearing her clown makeup while his marriage falls apart.

Earlier, Claire was stopped and hit on by a smarmy policeman named Gene Shepard (Tim Robbins), who just happens to be married to Marian’s sister, Sherri (Madeleine Stowe). Gene is already having an affair with Betty Weathers (Frances McDormand), the wife of a helicopter pilot named Stormy (Peter Gallagher). When Stormy discovers that Betty has been cheating, he takes a creative revenge on her house.

Doreen Pigott (Lily Tomlin) lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic husband, Earl (Tom Waits). Driving home from her waitressing job, Doreen hits a young boy. The boy says he’s okay but when he gets home, he passes out. His parents, news anchorman Howard Finnegan (Bruce Davison) and his wife, Anne (Andie MacDowell), rush him to the hospital, where his doctor is Ralph Wyman. As Howard waits for his son to wake up, he has a revealing conversation with his long-estranged father (Jack Lemmon, showing up for one scene and delivering an amazing monologue). Meanwhile, a baker named Andy (Lyle Lovett) repeatedly calls the Finnegan household, wanting to know when they’re going to pick up their son’s birthday cake.

Based on the short stories of Raymond Carver and directed by Robert Altman, Short Cuts can sometimes feel like a spiritual descendent of Altman’s Nashville. The difference between this film and Nashville is that Short Cuts doesn’t have the previous film’s satiric bite. As good as Nashville is, it’s a film that can be rather snarky towards it character and the town in which it is set. Nashville is used as a metaphor for America coming apart at the seams. Short Cuts, on the other hand, is a far more humanistic film, featuring characters who are flawed but, with a few very notable exceptions, well-intentioned. If Nashville seem to be a portrait of a society on the verge of collapse, Short Cuts is a film about how that society ended up surviving.

It’s not a perfect film. There’s an entire storyline featuring Annie Ross and Lori Singer that I didn’t talk about because I just found it to be annoying to waste much time with. (The Ross/Singer storyline was the only one not to be based on a Carver short story.) The conclusion of Chris Penn’s storyline wasn’t quite as shocking as it was obviously meant to be. But, flaws and all, Altman and Carver’s portrait of humanity does hold our attention and it leaves us thinking about connections made and sometimes lost. Seen today, Short Cuts is a portrait of life before social media and iPhones and before humanity started living online. It’s a time capsule of a world that once was.

1992’s The Player tells the story of Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins).

It’s not easy being Griffin Mill. From the outside, of course, it looks like he has the perfect life. He’s a studio executive with a nice house in Hollywood. He’s young. He’s up-and-coming. Some people, especially Griffin, suspect that he’ll be the president of the studio some day. By day, he sits in his office and listens to pitches from respected screenwriters like Buck Henry. (Henry has a great idea for The Graduate II!) During the afternoon, he might attends dailies and watch endless takes of actors like Scott Glenn and Lily Tomlin arguing with each other. Or he might go to lunch and take a minute to say hello to Burt Reynolds. (“Asshole,” Burt says as Griffin walks away.) At night, he might go to a nice party in a big mansion and mingle with actors who are both young and old. He might even run into and share some sharp words with Malcolm McDowell.

But Griffin’s life isn’t as easy as it seems. He’s constantly worried about his position in the studio, knowing that one box office failure could end his career. He fears that a new executive named Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) is after his job. Two new screenwriters (Richard E. Grant and Dean Stockwell) keep bugging him to produce their downbeat, no-stars anti-capitol punishment film. His girlfriend (Cynthia Stevenson) wants to make good movies that mean something. Even worse, someone is sending Griffin threatening notes.

It doesn’t take long for Griffin to decide that the notes are coming from a screenwriter named Dave Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio). Griffin’s attempt to arrange a meeting with Dave at a bar so that Griffin can offer him a production deal instead leads to Griffin murdering Dave in a parking lot. While the other writers in Hollywood mourn Dave’s death, Griffin starts a relationship with Dave’s artist girlfriend (Great Scacchi) and tried to hide his guilt from two investigating detectives (Whoopi Goldberg and Lyle Lovett). Worst of all, the notes keep coming. The writer, whomever they may be, is now not only threatening Griffin but also seems to know what Griffin did.

After spend more than a decade in the industry wilderness, Robert Altman made a critical and commercial comeback with The Player. It’s a satire of Hollywood but it’s also a celebration of the film industry, featuring 60 celebrities cameoing as themselves. Everyone, it seems, wanted to appear in a movie that portrayed studio execs as being sociopathic and screenwriters as being whiny and kind of annoying. The Player both loves and ridicules Hollywood and the often anonymous men who run the industry. Largely motivated by greed and self-preservation, Griffin may not love movies but he certainly loves controlling what the public sees. In the end, only one character in The Player sticks to her values and her ideals and, by the end of the movie, she’s out of a job. At the same time, Griffin has a social life that those in the audience can’t help but envy. He can’t step out of his office without running into someone famous.

The Player is one Altman’s most entertaining films, with the camera continually tracking from one location to another and giving as a vision of Hollywood that feels very much alive. Tim Robbins gives one of his best performances as Griffin Mill and Altman surrounds him with a great supporting cast. I especially liked Fred Ward as the studio’s head of security. With The Player, Altman mixes melodrama with a sharp and sometimes bizarre comedy, with dialogue so snappy that the film is as much a joy to listen to as to watch. That said, the real attraction of the film is spotting all of the celebrity cameos. (That and cheering when Bruce Willis saves Julia Roberts from certain death.) Altman was a director who often used his films to explore eccentric communities. With The Player, he opened up his own home.

Previous entries in 2025’s 14 Days Of Paranoia: