3 Women

viewed October 2, 1999 on PBS

For full information about this film, click here

Coen Brothers, eat your hearts out.  Long before you projected your inverted versions of salt-of-the-earth characters onto a landscape of lowbrow culture and alienation, Robert Altman had envisioned such a world for three amazing women to inhabit.  I have wondered what movies like The Big Lebowski or Raising Arizona would be like without their (sometimes distracting) dream sequences, and here I have a possible manifestation of my wishes.  But this movie flows dreamlike, as if the characters were sleepwalking through their collective existence.

Basic plot: Pinky (wonderfully open-eyed Sissy Spacek) starts work at an elderly rehabilitation center and is quickly enamored with Millie (Shelley Duvall - her best role ever?), a woman who, with her mastery of Betty Crocker recipes and outfits from God knows what mail order catalog, deceives herself, and Pinky, into thinking she's popular among male hospital workers and her fellow condo residents.  Pinky becomes her new roommate, and from then on their utterly realistic idiosyncrasies spin the plot into its own orbit. 

There are themes of gender, identity, consumer culture and low-income American lifestyles just asking to be explored here, and maybe they come to a head a little too abruptly at the quizzical denouement.  What I really take from this film is the beauty in depicting these lives, for their gaudiness, their unabashedness.  He is sympathetic and can cut right into the motivations of his two main protagonists, so that we are ready for the strange course of events they will take.  For Millie, her personal objects rule her sense of self-worth, and through Altman's camera we can see her in them: the mustard yellow car, the apartment, the cheese whiz she spurts on the hors d'oeurves are seen at once both satirically and sincerely.  Spacek is the epitome of sincere admration as Pinky lovingly follows her idol Millie -- but even this sincerity is brought into question: does Pinky aspire to Millie's faux bourgeois condescension of those she considers low class? 

The only major drawback I have about this film is the portentous flute score -- nothing else in the film is nearly as heavyhanded as this, not even the stunning climax.  The final movements are as mesmerizing as they are bewildering, and work only because it's so obvious that the movie is so assured of the truth of its characters that it's just following them along for the ride.

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