Review of McCabe & Mrs. Miller

by Roger Baldwin

McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a revisionist Western, but it isn't like other revisionist Westerns. Pauline Kael commented in 1971—when it was first released, largely unnoticed, as she was trying to champion an audience for it—that it was unlike other movies; 31 years later that remains mostly true. It soars as a poetic mood piece, an elusive and richly austere mini-tapestry set in the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the 20^th century, a few years after historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously announced the closing of the Western frontier and a celebrated era's end, as 19^th-century sensibilities were being rapidly displaced by the birth of urban, corporate America and other proliferating novelties of modern times. Director Robert Altman sets his story in the fictional mining village of Presbyterian Church, Washington, an isolated pocket detached from encroaching civilization. It exists as a vanishing anachronism, floating by like one of Mrs. Miller's opium reveries that evaporates into memory even as we watch it pass. The movie has an allegorical feel, yet it is grounded so concretely and persuasively into a specific locale that we think this could be the true West, a real past, but it's one we haven't been introduced to before, and much of it washes over us like the lost time of a drugged fantasy.

Robert Altman reached his height of originality early in his career, between 1970 and 1975, by mischievously tweaking and casually subverting established, hide-bound genres: with his counterculture assault on heroic war films in M*A*S*H; his wise-acre deconstruction of noir in The Long Goodbye; his sympathetic, languid treatment of the Depression-era, gangster movie, of misfits gone wrong in Thieves Like Us (his attempt to make Bonnie and Clyde). Altman is a failsafe, consistently provocative stylist—even when his movies are bad and many of them are, he hasn't been timid about taking risks that don't pay off and his instincts are sometimes off the charts. He's also one of the most difficult to imitate, efforts to do so usually come across as derivative knock-offs. Alan Rudolph, once Altman's cameraman, is his most identifiable protégé and only his second film, Choose Me, spoke in a satisfying, askew voice. Paul Thomas Anderson, one of our very excitingly-gifted writer-directors, has been more fortunate. He has used the epic, ensemble, character mosaic Altman set the standard for in Nashville to superb (Boogie Nights) and forgivably uneven (Magnolia) ends. After Nashville, Altman turned to interpreting theater (Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean, Streamers, Secret Honor) and other projects before he fell from the radar until his early 90s commercial comeback with The Player (which was extremely clever, but kind of shallow and categorically condescending) and Shortcuts. His most recent, Gosford Park—if no longer as surprising or transgressive as his earliest work—shows a master craftsman, at age 75, in intuitive command of his trade and ranks, I think, among his best. None of his thirty-some films, however, is as humane or personal as McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Altman often mocks his characters. Here he seems genuinely endeared to them.

The story itself is simple and deliberately traditional (the novel on which it is based was all clichés). A newcomer, John "Pudgy" McCabe (Warren Beatty), arrives in a grizzled town of 100 or so single men (at least one awaiting a mail-order bride) with some capital, a shadowy past and a winter coat that first appears to be a bear straddling his back. Thanks to his bankroll and the business savvy of the also just-arrived, Cockney-inflected, driven head madam Constance Miller (Julie Christie), he starts a successful enterprise—a whorehouse and (less successfully) a saloon for the local employees. An entrenched mining interest, Harriman-Shaughnessy, eyeing profits, offers to buy him out. Clearly out of his league and misguidedly believing himself to be a tough negotiator, he refuses, anticipating a better offer (McCabe isn't terribly bright, but during the haggling he is terribly drunk). Seeing him as an unredeemable fool, the company representatives pack their bags and send in hired guns to kill him and appropriate his property. McCabe spends the rest of the movie belatedly trying to save his hide.

The tale however, isn't so much the reason for the movie and those expecting a plot-driven film or yet another Western may not know exactly how to react to it. A lot of people have left the theater or shut off their VCR's puzzled and disappointed, wondering what the point was. McCabe is an achievement of miniature textures and asides, of bringing minor characters and their minor concerns into the thick of the story, but it doesn't follow the usual format. Altman uses a Western setting to involve us in his passerby approach to human interactions and the people of Presbyterian Church defy our expectations in unastonishing ways. What we find isn't particularly profound, the characters aren't complicated or given to witty or cute and eccentric movie dialogue or meaning-laden declarations, and we mine few nuggets of social or psychological depth. They don't fall into predictable, stereotypical slots, they aren't flattened out into familiar caricatures, they win neither our lasting admiration nor derision. They are what most average folk are—biography-unworthy but, if you take the time to notice, kind of interesting in their way, at least for the brief time you spend with them. The camera meanders into the middle of discussions, a stabbing, an accidental death and then back out again before they've been resolved or even fully-identified. We catch three couples dancing in wordless delight to a Gilded-Age version of a jukebox and then rushing excitedly over to the new-fangled contraption to watch it prepare the next copper disk for play. Prostitutes playfully and privately splash and giggle with one another as they bathe (McCabe has nudity without eroticism). These passages and others inhabit the moment and then segue into unrelated scenes. We glimpse them as outsiders, soon to move on, absorbing some of life's minutiae along the way, it's history as a parade of backdrops. No one has imagined the West as given in popular entertainment quite the way Altman does here. McCabe's lack of a magnetic center leaves some cold, but its disorienting originality, its highlighting of the margins, may mark his finest hour and one of Warner Brothers' more peculiar investments. It has certainly invited divided opinions.

As the popularity of the old Western began to decline in the 1960s, its conventions and political conservatism partly incorporated into urban police dramas, the revised Western was invented—irreverent and iconoclastic, like the decade itself. At a time when historians were first reconceiving the West in terms of theft, rapacious conquest and environmental destruction. In contrast to the old style which placed wholesome folk squarely in contrast to the bad guys, these movies played up the brutality of life for all involved (in the work of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah). As opposed to the solitary hero and his noble moral code, the reputations of common or cowardly individuals were distorted and transformed into larger-than-life folklore and legend (lovingly so in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in 1962, with extreme prejudice in Arthur Penn's Little Big Man by 1970). Altman entertains some of these themes, particularly McCabe's unwarranted respect as a killer, but he has no ideological ax to grind, he seems little interested in making a grand statement. He treats his movie close-up, as a series of stoic confrontations with relentlessly challenging geography—it's all forbidding hills and ropes of rain and snow and rivers of mud, everybody needs a hot bath and industrial laundering—and fleeting encounters with insignificant yet sentient lives, happened upon and only partly grasped. The narrative seems almost incidental to the movie's purpose, its familiarity and smallness all but disappear in the enveloping sense of place. We can best appreciate it if we are willing to sacrifice attachment to a strong story-line and instead surrender to wandering through a diorama.

Altman's layered, quilted style—which hit like gangbusters in M*A*S*H—is more emotionally mature here. We listen to bits and pieces of his signature, overlapping background conversations—themselves a moody soundtrack—fragments of lives, as we might in crowded bars or restaurants or department stores while tracking down an empty stool or table or sale item. We hear enough in McCabe's tavern to engage us—something is going on with these people—but not enough to give us more than a whisper of what that might be or if it amounts to very much. It doesn't, as does most of what we do day-to-day. These stale-smelling, sorry surroundings buzz with activity in small ways, and the personalities are less the individuals themselves than the unwashed subculture they give rough substance and vitality to. Altman's multi-tracked dialogue remains a fresh, a jarring way of storytelling which you might think would have been further explored and built on by other directors and screenwriters, although decades later he seems still to maintain an unchallenged copyright. One of the distinctive features of McCabe is that the comments made about its distinctiveness when it first opened have not yellowed and curled over time, it continues to stand out.

The early 1970s marked the heyday of the director as omnipotent auteur (satirized most amusingly by Peter O'Toole in Richard Rush's The Stunt Man, one of the decade's memorable innovations; filmed in 1976, its release was delayed until 1980 as production costs began to approach the heavens and Hollywood power was falling into the laps of capital-intensive producers and their newly-acquired Pinkerton force of aggressive marketing henchmen). But that period also brought cinematographers into the forefront as key players. Only occasionally in American movies has the director of photography dominated his scenes so completely, become the lead actor in his own right, as Vilmos Szigmond does here. His procession of muted, washed-away earth tones, underlit interiors (as they would have been with candles or kerosene and gas lamps) and pallid exteriors, an eternal dusk battered incessantly by the forces of nature, threatens almost to upstage the actors. By themselves, they work with shattering effectiveness as haunting museum stills, but they also anchor the drama into a lonely place. The settings frame the disparate, loosely-connected lives of little people, some of them dreamers with spacious ambitions and only a very long shot of ever realizing them.

Szigmond's visual power is given a personalized intimacy in Leonard Cohen's folk soundtrack. This may be the only movie, much less Western, to apply contemporary balladeering as an emotional soundscape to a distant period piece (although recently Moulin Rouge has engraved fin-de-siecle Paris with sources as unlikely as Elton John and Nirvana). Cohen's minor chords, plaintive simplicity and elliptical lyrics update the genre to respond to 60s-era attitudes which had grown restless with overworked conventions in pop culture and were hungry for fresh approaches—younger moviegoers in particular wanted a sound that resonated with their own experiences. But the music also has an existential quality, it evokes a melancholy that links the rootless individualism of a mythologized frontier to an equally-mythologized, modern, mass-culture alienation. The choice was a gamble, and it pays off handsomely. Chosen 30 years ago, it seems current.

Warren Beatty and Julie Christie shimmer in their ripe clothing. Beatty's McCabe bursts with soft-spoken bluster and swagger, he's given to baffling aphorisms ("if a frog had wings he wouldn't bump his butt so much, ya follow me?") and ongoing, mumbling dialogues with himself (McCabe is his own best conversational companion, no one else really understands him). Christie's Constance Miller is through and through clear-minded and unsentimental, she smokes tiny cigars, as well as opium, and gobbles down her eggs like a famished frontiersman. She has the stuff for success, though not with McCabe as her partner ("You think small," she lectures him). Both actors were stars at the time, known as much for their good looks as their talent. And both give understated, nonstar-vehicle, deeply convincing performances. As do all of the secondary actors, except for William Devane as Washington's "next senator," the lawyer who promises to lift the bounty on Beatty's head with publicity and the Constitution, the Old West figure that used to symbolize the coming of civilized order to a murderous wilderness. It's the one disconnected scene that ought later to connect to something, and Devane is too smug and ham-boned, as though he were brought in from a different, mainstream film. Rene Auberjonois as Sam McSheehan, the town's other businessman, is striking. He shuffles and shrugs and grins and bares his gray teeth, like an Irish Stepin Fetchit, but his alert eyes are quick to recognize a business opportunity, he knows they're rare in his neck of the woods.

In any case, McCabe & Mrs. Miller has won a position in many professional critics' pantheon, although it isn't the type of movie ever to attract a large audience. It does have an abundance of eccentric rewards, if you know where to look for them.

Read about McCabe & Mrs. Miller in the Internet Movie Database

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