Movies, Now More than Ever: Robert Altman’s The Play­er at 30

Seem­ing­ly out of nowhere, ​‘mul­ti­vers­es’ have become all the rage in Amer­i­can main­stream cin­e­ma, and director/​writer duo Daniels’ Every­thing Every­where All at Once is the lat­est film to embrace the idea – the only one not to exten­sive­ly refer to or be based on exist­ing IP.

With a pro­duc­tion bud­get of about $25m, focus­ing on a mid­dle-aged Chi­nese-Amer­i­can lead char­ac­ter and con­dens­ing all its lore-build­ing and char­ac­ter devel­op­ment to a sin­gle film that does not demand its audi­ence get up to speed by watch­ing count­less pre­vi­ous instal­ments, it’s far more dar­ing than any of the oth­er inter­di­men­sion­al flicks that have dom­i­nat­ed the box office in recent months.

The Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse has rev­o­lu­tionised the Hol­ly­wood fran­chise mod­el with its use of mul­ti-film sto­ry arcs, dili­gent­ly-hid­den ​‘East­er eggs’ and doing some­thing pre­vi­ous­ly thought impos­si­ble: find­ing a sure­fire way to make casu­al audi­ences stay to the end of the cred­its. Action films are espe­cial­ly con­cerned with the need to some­how ​‘go big­ger’ with sequels, but this is only sus­tain­able for a finite peri­od of time.

More than 25 films after the first chap­ter, (2008’s Iron Man) Mar­vel man­aged to find yet anoth­er way to achieve this spec­ta­cle – in the third instal­ment of the third iter­a­tion of Spi­der-Man this side of the mil­len­ni­um – by cross­ing it over with pre­vi­ous ver­sions. Watch­ing the film as some­one whose inter­est in Mar­vel films begins and ends with Sam’s Rai­mi tril­o­gy, I was remind­ed of the great Tony Sopra­no quote: “‘Remem­ber when’ is the low­est form of conversation.”

Remakes, sequels and oth­er­wise deriv­a­tive works are noth­ing new, how­ev­er. Thank­ful­ly, nei­ther are dis­sent­ing voices.

The Play­er, Robert Altman’s ​‘come­back’ film from 1992, is an intel­li­gent send-up of cor­po­rate Hol­ly­wood cul­ture, from the behav­iour of clue­less and arro­gant exec­u­tives to the con­stant revert­ing to old ideas. Many have called it pre­scient, but in real­i­ty the prob­lems are peren­ni­al. It cen­tres on Grif­fin Mill (Tim Rob­bins), a stu­dio exec­u­tive who kills David Kahane (Vin­cent D’Onofrio), a writer he believes is send­ing him death threats. Though the plot appears to be con­cerned with the inves­ti­ga­tion into the mur­der, ulti­mate­ly the sto­ry is sec­ondary to the film’s inten­tion­al­ly showy cin­e­mat­ic craft and cyn­i­cal cul­tur­al commentary.

The film opens with a sin­gle-take track­ing shot that lasts about eight min­utes, backed by Thomas Newman’s clat­ter­ing, para­noid score. The frame flits between an array of char­ac­ters involved with the stu­dio through this short peri­od in real-time and cru­cial­ly stays out­side the build­ing, stress­ing the appar­ent­ly unbreak­able bar­ri­er between the audi­ence and stu­dio suits. Some­body ref­er­ences the famous track­ing scene through 1950s Soho at the start of Julien Temple’s Absolute Begin­ners, though this is lost on his col­league who is unfa­mil­iar with said ​“Eng­lish film”.

We see a man pro­pose a sequel to The Grad­u­ate, set many years lat­er; a quick bit of Googling con­firms that this is actu­al­ly Buck Hen­ry, the writer of the orig­i­nal, whose involve­ment in The Play­er was his way of acknowl­edg­ing and mak­ing fun of con­tem­po­rary spec­u­la­tion about a poten­tial sequel. The long track­ing shot is histri­on­ic and mocks the idea that pulling off a dif­fi­cult shot some­how makes a film ​‘bet­ter’, even if it’s oth­er­wise incon­gru­ous with the rest of the film. Did the 10-sec­ond shot of Melanie Griffith’s Con­corde land­ing, only pos­si­ble to shoot in a sin­gle win­dow of 30 sec­onds every year, do much to help The Bon­fire of the Vanities?

Much of the film’s satire comes from the film pitch­es var­i­ous screen­writ­ers put for­ward. Richard E Grant’s char­ac­ter, Tom, pitch­es his idea for a film, Habeas Cor­pus, which involves an African-Amer­i­can woman going to prison, found guilty of a crime she did not com­mit. Cru­cial­ly, there is no hap­py end­ing and she nev­er appears to get jus­tice with­in the con­fines of the script.

He asserts that his pas­sion for the project comes from it being based on a reg­u­lar occur­rence which sad­ly con­tin­ues to hap­pen in Amer­i­ca, but it isn’t met with a very keen recep­tion by his supe­ri­ors because of its devo­tion to real­ism and lack of a hap­py end­ing. Grif­fin, know­ing that the con­cept would be a recipe for com­mer­cial dis­as­ter, con­vinces his col­league Lar­ry Levy (Peter Gal­lagher), whose fast rise through the indus­try threat­ens Griffin’s posi­tion, to spear­head the project, hop­ing that he’ll be forced to leave the project, allow­ing Grif­fin to take the reins, change it to be more com­mer­cial­ly appeal­ing, and enjoy the glo­ry that would come with doing so.

Towards the end, Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis play the leads in a film-with­in-a-film that Grif­fin has com­mis­sioned. Ear­li­er on in The Play­er, they are each men­tioned in stu­dio meet­ings as poten­tial leads for films being devel­oped, but the sug­ges­tion is always ridiculed and dis­missed. Iron­i­cal­ly, they have end­ed up in Habeas Cor­pus, which by this point has strayed so far from Tom’s idea that a black lead is nowhere to be seen and a hap­py end­ing has been added on – Willis storms into a prison, deus ex machi­na, to res­cue Roberts.

A gen­uine­ly sub­ver­sive and chal­leng­ing film has been com­plete­ly sani­tised and ulti­mate­ly com­pro­mised because the stu­dio believes that these changes will make it more palat­able to a wider audi­ence. Grif­fin has appar­ent­ly saved the film in a com­mer­cial sense, but the pur­pose of the sto­ry is now com­plete­ly defeat­ed. Regard­less, Grif­fin is now on very good terms with his col­leagues at the studio.

While The Play­er does not explore the ram­pant sex­u­al harass­ment that plagues Hol­ly­wood and the wider enter­tain­ment indus­try (Alt­man soon admit­ted he had been far too kind in his por­tray­al of stu­dio cor­po­rate types), it’s an impor­tant piece of work because it explores the chal­lenges innate to an art form which requires a lot of fund­ing to even exist. Hol­ly­wood is an indus­try. Each stu­dio is a com­pa­ny. They don’t make pic­tures to be didac­tic or artis­ti­cal­ly chal­leng­ing – their objec­tive is to turn a profit.

Its com­men­tary on sex is lim­it­ed, but still unde­ni­ably dar­ing. When Grif­fin and his mur­der victim’s wid­ow June (Gre­ta Scac­chi) have sex, it is shot in such a way that you can­not see below their shoul­ders. Scac­chi insist­ed on not being shot nude, and her refusal is in keep­ing with the film’s gen­er­al approach, which is frus­trat­ing the casu­al main­stream view­er and sub­vert­ing Hollywood’s most tired tropes. Addi­tion­al­ly, all of the 65 celebri­ty cameos are fleet­ing, and many aren’t even men­tioned by name or speak beyond a sin­gle line. In scenes of great con­gre­ga­tion, such as par­ties, Alt­man uses mul­ti­ple micro­phones to cre­ate over­lap­ping dia­logue – mean­ing that you will miss out on cer­tain strands of dia­logue, much like at a real party.

The Play­er has an appar­ent­ly hap­py end­ing – if you divorce it from con­text, for it is not a just one. Grif­fin comes home to a beam­ing June, who is preg­nant, and the pair walk into their beau­ti­ful house togeth­er, elat­ed. Grif­fin has got away with his crime, Lar­ry Levy is still unaware of Griffin’s plan and actu­al­ly likes him, and the pair have just com­mis­sioned a script whose plot mim­ics Griffin’s murder.

Thir­ty years on, The Play­er hasn’t lost any of its bite. Satire is built on exag­ger­a­tion, but if the film were made today, would any­thing be far off the cur­rent state of affairs? Aloof exec­u­tives, flac­cid attempts at reviv­ing well-worn IP, and sil­ly slo­gans like ​‘Movies, Now More than Ever’ haven’t gone away. ​‘Mul­ti­vers­es’ seem to be the nat­ur­al pro­gres­sion in attempt­ing to wring new life out of tired fran­chis­es and max­imise appeal and have already become a pre­dictable for­mu­la. Thank­ful­ly, Daniels’ Every­thing Every­where All at Once seeks to do some­thing orig­i­nal with this concept.