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a film of immediate emotional impact!" - Vincent Canby, The New York Times (1977) In Desert Springs, California, Shelley Duvall's transplanted Texan, "Thoroughly Modern" Millie Lammoreaux, seems to have leapt from the pages of Cosmo, Apartment Life and Woman's Day, with her Vidal Sassoonesque hairdo, pad by the pool in the Purple Sage singles complex, and her own "famous" dinner party fare: tuna melts, pigs-in-the-blanket with Cheez-Whiz, and store-bought shrimp cocktails (one per guest) -and a social life centered on virtual ghost emporium Dodge City, complete with empty swimming pool, abandoned miniature golf course, motorcycle track, and pickup bar. |
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Then, at the old folks rehab center, arrives straight-from-Houston Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek, fresh from Carrie and a quarter-century before In the Bedroom), with only one pair of underpants and a sewing machine to her name, and Duvall's orientation session turns into a bad case of hero worship for Spacek ("You're the most perfect person I ever met"). After the inevitable move-in, it's nonstop imitation-at-first-sight, until a near-fatal fall into the pool - was it a suicide attempt? - and resulting coma moves things on to an apparent personality transplant-takeover à la Bergman's Persona. And the entrance of the third woman - Janice Rule's reclusive, taciturn, extremely pregnant Willie, painting murals of amphibian people in her heat-packing husband's dry swimming pools - elevates the already-unsettling atmosphere, Altman's most dreamlike. |
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And no wonder: "The film literally came to
me in a dream," explained the director. A simultaneously
pathetic and fingernails-on-the-blackboard turn for
Duvall (who wrote her own monologues) in "a
comic performance as funny and moving as anything
you're likely to see this year" (Vincent Canby,
Times) that won her Best Actress awards from Cannes
and the L.A. Film Critics, and an equally chilling
performance from Spacek, whose performance won her
the Best Supporting Actress award from the New York
Film Critics Circle. "So utterly unusual that
its like may never materialize again, even from Altman."
- Andrew Sarris, Village Voice. A CRITERION PICTURES RELEASE OF A 20TH CENTURY FOX FILM |
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RETURN
TO ALTMAN SERIES
RETURN TO TOP.
Selections from Amazon.com:
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 Robert Altman's Subliminal Reality by Robert T. Self |
 Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff by Patrick McGilligan |
RETURN
TO ALTMAN SERIES
RETURN TO TOP.
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