As a fleet of helicopters spray chemicals to clear a fly infestation in suburban Los Angeles, the lives of multiple people living along the flightpath intersect in this 1993 comedy/drama they should have called Days of Our Flies.
With its satire of American society and interweaving narratives that coalescence in violence, Robert Altman’s Short Cuts is his Nashville for the ’90s, with jazz instead of country music. The director masterfully juggles nine short stories by Raymond Carver and 22 fully realised characters, all of them teetering on the edge of sanity (or possibly the world itself), played by an ensemble cast as mad as it is large.
They range from outsiders with wacky jobs (Jennifer Jason Leigh as a phone sex operator, Anne Archer as a party clown) to whackjobs in positions of authority (Tim Robbins as a cop, Peter Gallagher as a helicopter pilot). The interconnected stories mainly focus on fractious relationships (Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits’ alcohol-stained marriage being a highlight), with the constant menace of death and misogyny hanging in the air – particularly for the three friends (Fred Ward, Buck Henry and Huey Lewis) who harass Tomlin’s character in a diner before embarking on other classic American pastimes like going fishing and finding a dead body.
Short Cuts has an astonishing way of moving from tragedy to comedy in the same breath, especially the plot about a boy getting hit by a car and and being visited by his estranged, tone-deaf grandfather (Jack Lemmon) in hospital. This is Altman holding a circus mirror to American society and Hollywood convention, to reveal the clown convention hosted daily in the suburbs. He ingeniously captures the absurdity of the human experience, whether in situations as profound as grief or commonplace as house-sitting for neighbours. And so often that senselessness comes from the unknowability of other lives, as in the case of the unwitting baker (Lyle Lovett) who harasses the dying boy’s parents (Andie MacDowell and Bruce Davison) for not picking up the birthday cake they had ordered for him.
Altman daringly places his lost and lifelike characters on the fault lines of human interaction, and the viewer in emotionally and comically intense situations for three breathtaking hours. Along with his brilliant cast (which also includes Robert Downey Jr., Julianne Moore and Frances McDormand), he crafts a layer cake of irony, comedy and tragedy, and throws it straight into our stunned faces.
