The Men are Bad

Some women may be manhaters but I've always said few women can hate men as deeply as men can. It shows in a lot of movies and television, an example being Robert Altman's 1993 film Short Cuts. A three hour film that weaves together nine short stories and a poem by Raymond Carver, Altman offers portraits of malicious and cruel or pathetically selfish men from all walks of life and the women who love them and suffer for them. The incredible ensemble cast give good performances and some of the punchlines are funny but too much of the film sinks under a shadow of a cynical, sexist diatribe.

The characters are mostly grouped as married couples; Tom Waits and Lily Tomlin, Andie McDowell and Bruce Davison, Matthew Modine and Julianne Moore, Chris Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Robbins and Madeleine Stowe, Robert Downey Jr. and Lili Taylor, Peter Gallagher and Frances McDormand, Fred Ward and Anne Archer, and Lori Singer and Annie Ross play a daughter and mother. Jack Lemmon, Lyle Lovett, Buck Henry, and Huey Lewis play supporting characters.

Fred Ward along with Huey Lewis and Buck Henry provide the most egregious caricatures of male rottenness. The three go on a fishing trip and find a beautiful young woman's nude corpse in the river. Unable to decide what to do, they end up carrying on fishing for a few days before reporting her. Altman skirts over a lot of logistics in order to portray these men as terrible as possible, most notably the issue that it occurs to none of them, or to the authorities to whom they eventually report finding the body, that they may face legal troubles for not immediately reporting an apparent crime.

I'm not saying there aren't a lot of guys who would be stupid and selfish enough to react like these three guys but Altman has nothing in particular to say here beyond, "These men are horrible." They're like cartoon characters. The crowded cast may be partially responsible for the fact that most of the characters feel two dimensional but by the nature of the story showing how all these lives are intertwined, Altman could have taken the opportunity of showing how people show different sides to themselves in different situations. Which would have been a lot like Twin Peaks, which I suspect was an influence on this film. It's as though Altman heard about men crying over Laura Palmer's corpse washing ashore and said, "No. Men would react like monsters if no women were there to witness them." The time frame would've been right, even if it's true, as Wikipedia says, the script for Short Cuts was completed in 1989--Twin Peaks was first pitched to ABC in 1988. Altman could have then chosen the Raymond Carver stories that would best suit his rebuttal to Twin Peaks.

One portrayal of simplistic, selfish, horrible men is one drop in a sea of portrayals of simplistic, selfish, horrible men, blurring together in a dull catechism of self-flagellation.

Robert Downey Jr. plays a guy who brags about drugging women to have sex with him. Matthew Modine is nursing a grudge because he thinks his wife may have kissed a guy at a party a few years ago. Tim Robbins cheats on his wife with Frances McDormand, who's separated from her husband Peter Gallagher, who nonetheless is so enraged by the fact that she's dating that he breaks into her house when she's away and destroys all her clothes and furniture. Bruce Davison is a Bill O'Riley style TV demagogue, Lyle Lovett makes harassing phone calls to Davison and McDowell while their son is dying, and so on. Out of all the men, only Tom Waits comes off as kind of okay, I guess because he's basically playing Tom Waits. He wears a suit and goes to the bar and drinks against Lily Tomlin's wishes while he listens to Annie Ross sing.

A lot of reviews noted the surprising amount of female nudity in the film and essentially no male nudity. Julianne Moore has a dialogue scene where her vagina is exposed for almost the duration, Madeleine Stowe poses nude, Lori Singer goes skinny dipping while Chris Penn peeps at her, and Frances McDormand and of course the corpse are also naked in the film. Altman isn't doing this on accident, he's clearly making a point, the point being, I suspect, "Look how beautiful and vulnerable women are while men are morally ugly and aggressive."

One moment I thought was effectively funny was when Buck Henry, who took pictures of the corpse, goes to get his photos developed at the same shop as Robert Downey Jr. and Lili Taylor. Downey Jr. plays a movie makeup artist who did a photoshoot of Lili Taylor made up like a murder victim. Henry, who can see Taylor is very much alive, must have assumed it was some kind of kink and he decides to write down the couple's license plate, presumably to report him, while Taylor and Downey Jr. write down his, due to the photos of the real corpse. That one made me laugh. That and Tom Waits were some of the few bright spots in this generally grim exercise in cynicism.