I don't really think that you need it, but Spoiler Warning in effect for those who have not seen McCabe and Mrs. Miller or read a review of it.

Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller was neither ahead nor before its time as much as it was stuck right in the middle of it. The spaghetti westerns that had dominated the 1960s were gradually going out of style and genre icon John Wayne was quickly becoming a figure of derision among young Vietnam-era audiences. This most quintessential of American genres was ripe for a thorough revision. Shortly before McCabe and Mrs. Miller there was Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man, a relatively populist piece reaching for broad appeal but a significant one in subverting our sympathies away from the white settlers and cowboys and toward the “savage” natives. Shortly after McCabe and Mrs. Miller there was Stan Dragoti’s Dirty Little Billy where Billy the Kid is portrayed as a sad, unattractive, teenage delinquent. As of the time of this writing I haven’t seen Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson, also released that same year (1972), but I still feel fairly confident in preemptively assigning it tonally similar qualities. The New Western of the ‘70s resists creating avatars out of its characters. There are no heroes and there are no villains—everybody is painfully and sloppily human. These films are messy. They’re hairy and smelly and kind of ugly. And in a very real way, they sum up pretty much everything unique to American cinema in the 1970s.

Just like you, many of my earliest and most significant experiences were with American films from the seventies. I attribute this to the law of averages; I believe that so many ‘70s films were so hyper-personal that it was easy to find a film made just for me. But I’m not sure that the period itself is really one of my favorites. As hard as it is to imagine a world without Apocalypse Now, Alien, Eraserhead, Taxi Driver, Cries and Whispers, Dog Day Afternoon, A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection, The Exorcist, etc., a condensed list of the greatest films from the fifties, sixties or even eighties may very well prove to be more enticing. It’s the secular humanism of the seventies, the lack of heroes and villains, the almost agnostic answerless aesthetic of it all that sort of turns me off. It’s too earthy; it doesn’t go reaching for the stars. I don’t think that there is any filmmaker who so embodies the style of American ‘70s cinema as thoroughly as Altman, and as such, we are already off on a rocky start.

One of the stupid film buff arguments I have found myself starting is the “Kubrick vs. Altman” one. I pick Kubrick, initially because I find his films more “cinematic.” One opposition is that Altman is actually better because he’s not the perfectionist that Kubrick is. Altman’s films have room to breathe whereas Kubrick’s are sterile. I respond that I feel humancentrism is a crutch and great art should seek to reach a realm beyond that of human. It should be transcendent, and such transcendence cannot be achieved without an absolutist aesthetic. A second argument is that we shouldn’t even be comparing the two; they are as different as apples and oranges. This one I find particularly bothersome. In addition to reaching for the transcendent, I believe that great art should be reaching for an Absolute Truth—for some state of nirvana that is just spiritually, intellectually and experientially correct. I’m looking for the yardstick in which I can measure all other films. And of course, one would have to be an Altmanist (a secular humanist) anyway to even make the suggestion. A third argument is that Altman is better because he is actually more visually and thematically complex, and I’m just not taking the time to see it. That gives me some pause. But I wonder if complexity can really be applied as a criterion for greatness. Not as I define it, at least. It seems to infer that the process of deconstruction itself is more important than the actual results. If anything, textual complexity may even be detrimental to greatness. I am not looking for the densest possible film with the most information crammed in; I’m searching for the purest possible cinematic experience. I want to be absorbed and snatched away into another dimension and I cannot achieve this through active conscious viewing. If there is an academic aspect to my watching films it is likely to be less of applying what I know to the film and more of applying the film to what I know. That feeds into making personal value judgments about the cinema, but that is, in fact, the way that most of us watch movies. Pretty much any other approach seems to me to have very limited utility. At the very least though, that argument forced me to reassess what I meant by “cinematic.”

One of the funny things about the seventies is that they cannot, by design, ever be repeated. The hyper-humancentrism isolates these films into a specific time and place and inhibits them from being generalized into the atemporal American or world culture. In Alain Klaser’s superb 1995 miniseries American Cinema, Altman says that pretty much all of his films would have bombed miserably if they were made two years earlier or two years later. That suggests, of course, that Altman is the seventies and the seventies are Altman and the two are connected at the hip. And it also suggests that his work has a very short sell-by date.

In terms of the filmmaking, let's compare and contrast Altman and Kubrick's use of the zoom lens. In Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures Martin Scorsese describes Kubrick's use of the zoom in Barry Lyndon as flattening out the image so that it resembles a painting. This seems valid in the absolutist aesthetic in that it seems to surpass the cultural and academic meanings of the zoom-in and can be made evident to the layman. Similarly, in The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut, the zoom-in injects adrenaline into the scene by breaking away from the formalist restraint he has established earlier throughout the film. He seems to use it because there is no other camera movement that moves quickly enough or violently enough for the shot. Altman uses the zoom lens much more extensively in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. I suppose that you could make a case that he too uses it because it's the best choice for the shot, but the argument would not be as strong as it would with Kubrick.

Altman's filmmaking doesn't call as much attention to itself; when he uses the zoom it feels organic and somewhat unconscious. Aside from the film's second-to-last haunting shot, I have difficulty remembering a significant use of the zoom lens throughout the whole film. I mean, it's used constantly, but there is never an instance where the movement resonates with portentous significance. In contrast, I remember exactly where I saw Kubrick's zoom-in in Eyes Wide Shut: when the prostitute offers her life in order to spare Dr. Bill's. This suggests to me that the camera movement in Altman's film has metastasized into the visual language of the film rather than existing on its own terms. Altman is not drawing from a library of filmmaking techniques, he's drawing from a library of seventies filmmaking techniques. Altman's naturalistic use of the zoom lens dates the film in the seventies—it’s a tale told in an obsolete dialect. Altman used the zoom lens a few times in 2001's Gosford Park—during the duck hunt I believe and in some of the exterior shots. But even then it seemed merely quaintly anachronistic; in its own way, it became part of a holistic film style.

I'm treading carefully, I guess; I'm believing that there is something complicated in Altman's technique that I am somehow not privy to. But whatever it is, it doesn't lend itself as easily to filmic deconstruction as one of Kubrick's do. If you study it in film school, I'm sure it would be more for its cultural qualities than in how to frame, block, edit or film a motion picture. And if there is something complex about it, then it requires some degree of digestion that Kubrick is able to bypass. I think that great cinema is chemical, not academic, and even when they're flawed, Kubrick's films are much more adept at producing a smoother, more potent high. To really understand McCabe and Mrs. Miller, you would either have to get in your time machine and live the last few years up to 1971, taking in all the various environmental influences, or you would have to learn the language in the same way that you would have to learn French to read French poetry. The value of the film is not particularly intrinsic or universal, it's specific to a certain time in American history and that's not at all a small problem.

After my first viewing, I had come to think of McCabe and Mrs. Miller as being a rather ugly film. It's set in the cold, wet Pacific Northwest and there are lots of earthy browns and stark, bleak whites. This isn't a place that you would consider wanting to live in. And the film is peopled with lots of ugly faces. Handsome Warren Beatty ugs it up with a bushy brown beard that somehow seems to be hiding a nerdy overbite and chinless profile while Julie Christie's pretty face is neutralized by a stack of curly muddy-brown hair. Beatty's McCabe and Christie's Mrs. Miller run a brothel, and both employees and clients are kind of gruesome—veterans of many a harsh winter and so cut off and atrophied from the influences of civilization that they regard Mrs. Miller as having a sophisticated brand of beauty. There seem to be a lot of long and medium shots—a sense that Altman is keeping his distance and using his manners. I was rather puzzled by David Gordon Green's assertion, made in the commentary track for the Criterion Edition of George Washington, that this is the most beautiful movie ever made. I can agree with him making that comment about Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool or Malick's three, and so I was a little blind about why he would place this film in the same ballpark, much less above those other four.

I have to confess to being much more impressed this second time around and as much as I hate to admit it, what contributed the most to my reassessment was seeing the film in its original aspect ratio. McCabe and Mrs. Miller was shot in anamorphic widescreen, but my first viewing was one taped off of Encore Western! where the film had been squeezed into full frame. I was nothing short of stunned when I saw Kalifornia and Blue Velvet as they were intended to be seen. I had liked them a lot before, but it wasn't until I saw them on DVD that I realized that they were masterpieces. Even the most seemingly cinematic of films can become banalized when forced into the television format. Until my fateful DVD viewing, I had actually believed that Blue Velvet was an eighties film! My opinion about the look of McCabe and Mrs. Miller really hasn't changed all that much, but still the correct anamorphic transfer reveals a certain visual splendor that can almost justify Green's adulation. The film may have a petty side, but it is far from lacking in beautiful broad stokes of visual excitement.

I've seen McCabe and Mrs. Miller described as a "demystification" of the Western (and by extension, I guess, all Hollywood films of the classical studio mold). I wouldn't quite go as far as calling that statement patently false or even superficial, but it doesn't quite tell all the story. I'm a tad squeamish about "demystifications" as is. Reactions and countermovements to the dominant culture are okay for a while but sooner or later I'm looking for some kind of Absolute Truth. If we are to argue that McCabe and Mrs. Miller has some kind of beauty to it, and I think that it does, then it must follow that it also has some kind of mythos. Beautification and idealization can't help but go hand in hand. My feelings toward Leonard Cohen's folksy theme song are rather complicated. The song has a distinct cheeseball quality and it would be grossly dishonest to suggest otherwise. The "’70s-ness" of the film is accentuated and cemented by Cohen's song, leaving it vulnerable to a harsh snarking by the less mature of viewers who may feel the need to cheerfully render their own version. But still, I can't help but agreeing with the film's admirers that the song works on its intended level, contributing a sad but senstive atmosphere to the film that actually gels with the cold bleak visual environment. You can distance yourself from the film's ‘70s-ness only so much; eventually it begins affecting you on its own terms.

Now, the very presence of the Cohen song contradicts this view of Altman as being an objectivist and of McCabe and Mrs. Miller being a realistic evocation of the 19th century Pacific Northwest. The song gives shape to the material; it "artifies" it and helps to provide some sort of statement and/or perspective toward the "Wild" West. Cohen's song is entitled “The Stranger Song” and includes such earnestly evocative/embarrassing lines as:

Like any dealer he was watching for the card that is so high and wild
He'll never need to deal another
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger.

Mmm. Cohen is singing about McCabe. I guess that you could work at establishing the connections between character and text, but it's not particularly necessary. The song introduces McCabe when he comes into town, laments him when he dies, and illuminates the nature of the character when an assassin confirms that he "never killed a man in his entire life.” And besides, who else could Cohen have been talking about? Now, by identifying McCabe through the archetype of "a dealer" and then through the weighty myth of "a Joseph looking for a manger," Cohen is mythologizing McCabe. And so, it strikes me as inaccurate to describe McCabe and Mrs. Miller as a demystification of the Western. The film is actually more of a remystification; that is to say, still a myth. There's nothing wrong with myths of course; far from it, I would prefer a cinema of myths to a cinema without them. But I'm making a point—McCabe and Mrs. Miller is guilty of idealization, albeit on its own terms.

The issue of the whores and the film's attitude toward women is particularly interesting to me. Why aren't the whores pretty? Well, I think that the film is trying to subvert the idea of whoredom as being a male fantasy. Selling her expertise on brothel management, Mrs. Miller asks McCabe if he knows what to do when the girls get their "monthlies,” or if he knows what to do when they don't get their monthlies, or if he knows what to do when one girl fancies another. And the film really tries to bring any aspirations of sexual adventure back down to earth. But still the film holds up prostitution as, if not exactly being a good choice for frontier women, probably the best possible choice. Being a whore actually gives Mrs. Miller marketable business skills and grants her a certain degree of autonomy. At one point she even explains to new recruit Shelley Duvall that she'll be doing the same thing that she did with her husband, only now she'll have some money for herself. Only in the age of Klute (or maybe Pretty Woman) could prostitution be held up as a means for feminist liberation.

There is a modicum of eroticism in a throwaway scene where the whores play uninhibited in the brothel's bathhouse, again encompassing an early seventies hippy-dippy wavy-gravy "let it all hang out" idealization of sexuality. Pretty much all of the sex takes place off-screen and there is a constant feeling that the whores are giggling to one another about the customers. One goofball (played by Keith Carradine) doesn't even have the sense to get indignant when one girl whispers some disparaging remarks about the size of his penis.

Now compare this to HBO's “Deadwood” where, in an early episode, a drunk naked prospector interrupts brothel owner and series villain Al Swearengen's beating of a subordinate by barging in the room holding his penis like a branding iron and screaming, "That snatch is branded!" The whores in “Deadwood” aren't really lookers either—they’re quite plain as a matter of fact—but they do get the ever-living shit fucked out of them and it ain't pretty. The “Deadwood” whores aren't spared their dignity and they aren't given the means to subvert the patriarchal system that they are enslaved under. Brilliantly, the show doesn't glamorize or eroticize prostitution while understanding that in the “Deadwood” universe these women are still more or less inanimate objects for men to ejaculate into. Imagine that—actually arguing that frontier prostitution is a pretty bad career for a woman to inhabit.

I certainly wouldn't go so far as to suggest that “Deadwood” objectively shows the West as it really was. It's not a documentary, it's art, and as art it shapes the subject matter through its own perspective. “Deadwood” emphasizes the brutality and moral bankruptcy of the period, expanding on this idea of genre revision by subverting not only the good guy/bad guy polarities of the classical movie western but also McCabe and Mrs. Miller's cuddly depiction of brothel life. “Deadwood” is too smart to really be labeled "anti-capitalist.” Like “The Sopranos” it doesn't take a moral position on the killers and kingpins, preferring to take a semi-detached, deeply cynical view of the machinery behind the most free of American free enterprise. In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, McCabe is killed by some hired guns after he fails to sell out his brothel to an encroaching mining company. You would think that Altman would demonize the mining company and let this idea that the thugs aren't criminals but "legitimate" businessmen sink in and simmer a little. But no, the company reps are relatively soft-spoken and reasonable, and McCabe is just lovably thick-headed; and Altman has McCabe go see a lawyer who wants to take his case for free to puff up his image for his political career and recites a speech about how small businessmen like McCabe made America. And you know that the lawyer is a satirical figure and so what he says is a satirical message because Altman doesn't want us to believe in it because he doesn't want to deify McCabe as an all-American hero.

Because he doesn't exactly represent any lofty ideals, McCabe doesn't die a martyr's death. However, he does die a tragic death. I mean, he was just this sweet dumb schmuck and now he's dead, and it's sad because we were really getting to like him. While McCabe and Mrs. Miller admirably refuses to demonize the mining company or deify McCabe, its semi-whimsical mushiness toward human fallibility creates its own sense of dogmatism. Altman comes off as sort of a hippy Frank Capra here; he finds beauty in the ugliness of the miners and prostitutes. He sells it as a genuine earthiness, but he is either unwilling or incapable of finding the ugliness in ugliness, in which I believe may lie a greater Truth about the human condition. McCabe says that he has poetry in him and Altman seems to believe that he does. I wonder—would he have been able to make an (interesting) film about a character who didn't have any poetry in him? After seeing the "that snatch is branded" guy in “Deadwood,” it's difficult to view McCabe and Mrs. Miller as being anything else but an antiquated fairy tale.

I haven't really out and out said this in this review, but I did warm up a bit to McCabe and Mrs. Miller since my last viewing. I think that you can buy into it if you approach it at a direct angle for what it is: a Western made in the 1970s. There is a sense in which, freed from any external test for truth, beauty is beauty. The image of McCabe lying lifeless in the snow coupled with Mrs. Miller trying to displace the memory him with an afternoon at the opium den is genuinely one of the cinema's all-time great movie endings. I was engaged with the movie up to the very last frames and felt affected by it. I really think that I melted a little for McCabe when the bounty hunter dismisses the claims that he's a killer. I do have to wonder why Altman had McCabe shoot the hunter in the head before he died. This turns McCabe into a killer, thus preserving his dignity and softening the blow of those final shots. As the film seems to have a general disregard for violence and is reluctant on making heroes of its characters, I really can't find any justification for this development in the film. Send me your thoughts on this if you got them; for some reason I haven’t read any reviews that acknowledge this.