Raymond Carver | 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.

Everything Must Go is Will Ferrell’s attempt to prove that he can be a serious actor and to a large extent, he succeeds. I saw this film at the Plano Angelika and the audience, at first, seemed to be rather confused as they realized that Will Ferrell wasn’t going to be particularly funny in this film. However, as the film progressed, his performance — if not the film itself — seemed to win the audience over. Though, at first glance, this film would seem to have little in common with Anchorman or Tallegada Nights, it does fit in nicely as part of the Mediocre American Man trilogy. It’s just that here, we’re supposed to feel for Ferrell’s mediocre American man as opposed to laugh at him.

In Everything Must Go, Ferrell plays a middle-aged, alcoholic who, after getting fired from his job, returns home and discovers that his wife has locked himself out of the house and has put all of his possessions out on the front lawn. Over the next few days, Ferrell spends his time sitting out in the front yard, drinking beer, dealing with the neighbors, and eventually — with the help of a neighborhood kid (Christopher Jordan Wallace) — holding a yard sale that, as you can probably guess — serves as a metaphor for the sorry state of his life in general. The film is based on the short story Why Don’t You Dance? by Raymond Carver and, as you can tell from the plot synopsis, it’s definitely not a film to see without your Cymbalta.

I wanted to like Everything Must Go a lot more than I actually did. It’s a beautifully shot film that features scenes of true insight and pathos. Unfortunately, for every scene of subtle power, there’s another scene where director Dan Rush pushes too hard to appeal to easy sentiment. There’s a wonderfully awkward yet poignant scene in which Ferrell tracks down and talks to a woman (played by Laura Dern) who he barely knew in high school. Ferrell and Dern have a great chemistry and the scene is difficult to watch precisely because it’s so honest and revealing. However, to get to that scene, you have to deal with scenes of Ferrell dealing with a self-righteous neighbor (Stephen Root) or awkwardly talking to the pregnant woman (Rebecca Hall) who has just moved in across the street. These scenes are awkward for the opposite reason — they just seem so false, forced, and predictable.

Falling somewhere in between are the scenes in which Will Ferrell befriends a lonely neighborhood boy, played by Christopher Jordan Wallace. Wallace does a good job in the role and he and Ferrell act well opposite each other but, at the same time, it’s hard not to feel as if the Wallace is being used more as a dramatic device than an actual character. It’s hard not to feel that this is yet another film in which the filmmakers attempt to get us to accept bad behavior on the part of a white protagonist by having him befriend the only black person in the entire movie.

Everything Must Go is Will Ferrell’s attempt to prove that he can play a serious role and it must be said that he succeeds even as the film fails. Essentially, he’s just playing a real world version of the same goofy, overgrown boys that he plays in his comedies but he’s smart enough as a performer to realize that and use it to his advantage. Ferrell understands that, in real life, both Ron Burgundy and Ricky Bobby would be burned-out dinosaurs with failed marriages and no place to live. If nothing else, Everything Must Go proves that the line between comedy and tragedy is quite thin indeed.