Brilliant Altman Piece by Richard Schickel (Part 2)

For a few years, Altman was indulged by many critics and some studios and, admittedly, there are artful passages in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (a critique of nascent capitalism that is probably his best work), "Nashville," "California Split" and . . . very little else.
Misanthropy -- with a strong admixture of misogyny -- essentially substitutes for ideas in his movies and his characters are, in effect, characterless. They wander about fecklessly, striking solipsistic, but rarely authentically rebellious, poses and almost never getting into dramatically gripping conflicts.
Thus this question: How did a man with no interest in the fundamentals of film get taken seriously for as long as he did? I'm not arguing that the well-made Hollywood movie is the only possible filmmaking mode. The likes of Renoir, Bergman, Bunuel decisively disprove that notion.
But the greats all share intentionality, the need to direct our attention to something that was on their minds. They did not leave their people flopping around until something printable happened.
The portrait of Altman that emerges in this book is of a permissive man -- especially with himself. Addled by his addictions, a habitual gambler, disastrously careless with money and with intimate relations, he left us feeling we were trapped in someone else's not-very-interesting drug haze.
Within a decade of "MASH," he was pushed back to the margins from which he had sprung. Thereafter, he made his (partial) comebacks -- "The Player," "Short Cuts," "Gosford Park" -- but almost always vitiated these modest successes with virtually unwatchable movies: "Dr. T & the Women" anyone?
To me, the most poignant of Zuckoff's witnesses is Jules Feiffer, writer of "Popeye," one of Altman's few big studio productions, gamely hanging out on location (it was on Malta, difficult for the suits to reach), fighting to preserve his words as Altman and Robin Williams reduced them to shtick. After many fights (and reconciliations), Feiffer eventually left the picture, thinking correctly that there was more rage simmering beneath Altman's apparent good nature than anyone had noticed.
This anger was of the passive-aggressive kind, always the most difficult to placate. But even the hard-used Feiffer could never quite abandon Altman. He uses the word "genius" to describe him, although it is, in this context, a conventionalized descriptive.
If a Hollywood director strikes rebel poses, we like to believe that it is in aid of thwarted masterpieces. This ignores the smooth operators like Hawks, Hitchcock, and Lubitsch, who made their great films without ruffling any feathers, just as it ignores the fact that Altman has no such works to his credit.
His films do not transcend their times; even the best of them remain trapped within those times.
This book provides massive evidence that people had lots of fun making them, but none whatsoever that they will survive as anything more than historical curiosities.