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What to make of a diminished thing, as Frost would say, thus a holdover Seventies film against the Eighties nostalgia for the Fifties. On the margins of the margins, painted clouds over a dinky Texas shop, home of The Disciples of James Dean. The brush with myth leaves its mark, the neurotic extra on Giant (Sandy Dennis) still prattles about it at the twenty-year reunion ("Elizabeth Taylor's head keeps getting in the way, but I'm there"). The provincial pinup (Cher) cloaks her own melancholy in sassiness, the Bible-thumping owner (Sudie Bond) lights a Jesus mosaic in neon, superstar shrines within superstar shrines. In strolls the white-suited stranger (Karen Black), glamorous and mysteriously acerbic, she once was the "sick boy" in the stockroom (Mark Patton). "Unlike all of you, I have undergone... a change." The James Dean Story plus 3 Women, one of the fiercest of Robert Altman's private worlds. Bergman is the model for the close filming, with a dash of Fassbinder (the staring mannequins from The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant have become plastic masks) and a vast mirror to anchor the folding of past and present. "Summer all over again," atrophied cults to fill the desert void. The brassy cowgirl (Kathy Bates) and the pregnant doormat (Marta Heflin) are, like the rest of the play, sub-Inge contrivances transformed by vivid actresses and a virtuosic camera. (Dissolves and superimpositions are prevalent, as befits the welter of memory and pretense, denial and confession.) "It's only the front, of course. That's the way they do things in the movies." Altman in blown-up Super 16mm, a feminine mental state ending in the image of the emporium crumbling into dust—desolation or escape? Streamers hears from the fellas. Cinematography by Pierre Mignot.
--- Fernando F. Croce |