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This week, Chicago moviegoers can enjoy not one but two films by Robert Altman. The Long Goodbye, his chief masterwork, screens at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of their ongoing series “Public Enemies: The Gangster/Crime Film,” while the Patio has a far lesser work,Thieves Like Us, a tepid update of Nick Ray’s They Live by Night that lacks The Long Goodbye‘s revisionist air. It’s a unique pairing in that the films respectively represent the highs and lows of Altman’s artistry, the former displaying his penchant for myth, genre alchemy, and dry humor, the former indicative of the occasional indifference he showed his subject. (Dave Kehr, in his capsule for They Live by Night, correctly points out that Altman “drained [the] dark poetry” from the source material when he made Thieves Like Us.)
- Short Cuts (1993) By the far the best of his “ensemble films,” more evocative than A Wedding and more emotional than Nashville. The film’s myriad moods and interlocking stories form a vivid if somewhat aloof mosaic, seemingly unencumbered by traditional narrative and on its own ambiguous, spontaneous wavelength. Of course, it’s carefully crafted, as all of Altman’s films are—his ability to make the meticulous appear effortless is perhaps his most lasting quality.
