The Long Goodbye

I absolutely loved this movie. Robert Altman seems to be a frustratingly mixed bag. This movie in incredible, and from what I remember I liked Nashville a lot, but it's been years since I saw that. Three Women was okay, but not even close to this, I think. Short Cuts was kind of interesting, but not only in a TV movie on a Sunday afternoon kind of way.

The camera is almost never still in this movie, but it's not jerky the way non-stationary cameras usually are on contemporary movies. The camera floats around outside of every scene. It's beautiful. I especially liked the way the camera sometimes would float backwards out of the scene, to the point that the actors seemed to be performing in the background, although there was nothing in the foreground. It's such a weird little touch that I can think of very few movies doing, and it would be really hard to do it, I think, without it becoming annoying. Maybe a lot of people would find it annoying here, too, but I, obviously, loved it.

Elliot Gould is really what makes the movie, though. His performance just might be one of my favorite film performances ever. The way he basically mumbles every line, to the point that it sometimes doesn't seem possible that the other characters actually hear anything he says. The effect of that little quirk is the viewer feels closer to Marlowe than any of the other characters, because it is almost like we're getting to hear his private thoughts--without any voiceover narration or any actual private thoughts being aired.

The cat in the first scene really acted like it lived in that house. I wonder how they did that. Was it actually the cat of the house? The cat also seemed really familiar with Elliot Gould, which makes me wonder if it was Gould's cat, if that was Gould's house. I doubt it, but however they did it, the cat looked really naturally at home, which I think is kind of amazing.

My favorite shot in the whole film came when the husband and wife were talking to each other and they sent Marlowe outside. So the scene is their discussion, which you see through the giant window, and in the reflection of the window you can see Marlowe strolling around on the beach, throwing stones or whatever. It is really a beautiful shot. It did seem a little out of place, though, only because it's the only time in the movie, I think, where there's a significant amount of time spent with Marlowe not as the focus of the scene, or not really present. There are small moments of that throughout, so it's not like it violates any precedent really, but the length and seeming significance of the shot did seem sort of out of place. The shot was so pretty, though, that it didn't really matter.

The chicks, though, who live in the apartment across the way from Marlowe, seemed like a total misstep by Altman. They were far enough outside the realm of normal human behavior that they bordered on surreal, which made them seem as if they must be there for some kind of symbolic purpose, but I don't think they really were supposed to be. I assume that simply the weird surreal thing is what Altman was going for, but they just didn't really bring anything to the film aside from the funny couple of lines by the guy who was supposed to be following Marlowe.

Also, from a plot standpoint, Marlowe tracking down his old friend in Mexico seemed closure enough. The fact that Marlowe then shot him was really jarring, and frankly I think it shouldn't have happened. Based on the little bit of the interview with Altman I watched, I assume this was supposed to be Marlowe's ultimate giving in to the new morality or lack thereof. It almost seemed like some sort of following of the dictum that the main character of a story must be a protagonist, which means he must undergo some kind of change. But the change seemed completely forced. It was not consistent with Marlowe as he was at any other point in the film. It seemed kind of like adding an exclamation point tacked on the end of an ellipsis. I have this idea that that's the sort of thing you have to deal with in Altman films, though: sometimes really misguided things put in that he probably thought were really smart or cool but are actually just kind of stupid.