3 WOMEN
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Robert Altman
Starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Janie Rule
Released in 1977
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Robert Altman
Starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Janie Rule
Released in 1977
If one function of film is to inform our dreams, then fairness requires dreams to fulfill our movies. The 1977 Robert Altman film 3 Women succeeds.
Altman has a dream and on his way to the airport, stops at 20th Century to see Alan Ladd Jr., who green-lights the project in time for the director to catch his flight. After all, this was Robert Altman and Fox did owe a debt of gratitude to cinema and certainly it didn't matter much that there was no script at this point. Who needed a script when the ending was still unformed?
Has anyone ever told you that your dreams did not make sense or that they were not logical? You'd probably laugh at anyone who dared say such a thing because what you'd been discussing was ephemera, intangible, a series of images which the brain has conjured out of all the senses presented to it, reconstructed in a way that does not rely upon logic for its value. 3 Women, just like our dreams, does have a kind of logic, but it isn't the kind in which we move through in our awakened periods, although, as with our dreams, it often accentuates the most intriguing aspects of what we call our own personal reality.
If we are regular movie-goers in 1977, we recognize Sissy Spacek from the previous year's Carrie, a film heavy with dream sequences. From the instant we set eyes upon her character Pinky, we suspect that something is not quite right with the young lady, that something about her does not quite fit, and that just possibly we should not trust what we see. Today she begins her first day of work helping old folks at a physical therapy facility in what feels like an area east of Los Angeles, out in the desert. That she is much younger than those for whom she is responsible is no coincidence since Pinky acknowledges nothing about her own parents, as becomes quite clear later in the film. The spa surroundings are the kind of places where cowboy films of Wyatt Earp have been shot right alongside miniature golf courses.
Pinky meets Mildred, played by Shelley Duvall. We recognize Ms. Duvall from any number of earlier Altman creations and we notice right away that she too fails to fit in with the people around her, whether they are her coworkers or her neighbors. Millie is assigned to show Pinky the ropes, probably because the boss suspects they will get along, or else as punishment for both of them being just a bit unusual. Indeed, Millie spends a good bit of the movie having conversations with people who do very little to acknowledge her existence. Adding to their sense of unease, neither Milly nor Pinky have much in the way of a background and this is deliberate. When a character enters our dream, we do not have time to evaluate that person's history. Instead we make quick and disjointed impressions of the person and that is all we can do with the characters in this movie. Maybe Millie is a weird duck and maybe the weirdness is really everyone else.
Also working in the spa are two female twins, neither of whom contributes much to the narrative other than being so aloof that we simply dislike them in general and even feel a small sense of relief when one of the coworkers tells Pinky, "We don't like the twins."
Far and away the most disjointed character in the movie is Willie Hart, played to near silent perfection by Janice Rule. Willie creates sand paintings on swimming pools and elsewhere and she is with child until the last few minutes of the film. She is married to a retired stunt man who used to work in cowboy pictures.
For all intents and purposes, these three women could all be different aspects of one another and when it turns out that Pinky's "real" name is Mildred, we are not terribly surprised, although we are properly disturbed, just as we are troubled by the rhyme of the name Willie. These three women have suffered damages and they continue to suffer them, on and on until the women seem to merge into a single unit, be it a nuclear family, a Manson Family, or a single person with three personas.
To say more about the story would be to risk divulging the narrow and winding plot. However, it pulls on me to say that dream-work in this picture is very much impressionistic, in the artistic sense of the word, a facet that is not uncommon in much of Altman's work. The Long Goodbye was rife with extended sequences that not only felt dreamy but which even drifted away from the Raymond Chandler novel enough to be their own reaction to having read the book. Even given the soft and deadly punch from the brilliant, instinctive acting of the three principals in this motion picture, the real performance remains the movie itself, at once loping along with all the time in the world just as it abruptly shifts to tense alignments that rustle the pulse. If you were to only view one Robert Altman film, it should beNashville. If you have the luxury of two, the second must be 3 Women.
Altman has a dream and on his way to the airport, stops at 20th Century to see Alan Ladd Jr., who green-lights the project in time for the director to catch his flight. After all, this was Robert Altman and Fox did owe a debt of gratitude to cinema and certainly it didn't matter much that there was no script at this point. Who needed a script when the ending was still unformed?
Has anyone ever told you that your dreams did not make sense or that they were not logical? You'd probably laugh at anyone who dared say such a thing because what you'd been discussing was ephemera, intangible, a series of images which the brain has conjured out of all the senses presented to it, reconstructed in a way that does not rely upon logic for its value. 3 Women, just like our dreams, does have a kind of logic, but it isn't the kind in which we move through in our awakened periods, although, as with our dreams, it often accentuates the most intriguing aspects of what we call our own personal reality.
If we are regular movie-goers in 1977, we recognize Sissy Spacek from the previous year's Carrie, a film heavy with dream sequences. From the instant we set eyes upon her character Pinky, we suspect that something is not quite right with the young lady, that something about her does not quite fit, and that just possibly we should not trust what we see. Today she begins her first day of work helping old folks at a physical therapy facility in what feels like an area east of Los Angeles, out in the desert. That she is much younger than those for whom she is responsible is no coincidence since Pinky acknowledges nothing about her own parents, as becomes quite clear later in the film. The spa surroundings are the kind of places where cowboy films of Wyatt Earp have been shot right alongside miniature golf courses.
Pinky meets Mildred, played by Shelley Duvall. We recognize Ms. Duvall from any number of earlier Altman creations and we notice right away that she too fails to fit in with the people around her, whether they are her coworkers or her neighbors. Millie is assigned to show Pinky the ropes, probably because the boss suspects they will get along, or else as punishment for both of them being just a bit unusual. Indeed, Millie spends a good bit of the movie having conversations with people who do very little to acknowledge her existence. Adding to their sense of unease, neither Milly nor Pinky have much in the way of a background and this is deliberate. When a character enters our dream, we do not have time to evaluate that person's history. Instead we make quick and disjointed impressions of the person and that is all we can do with the characters in this movie. Maybe Millie is a weird duck and maybe the weirdness is really everyone else.
Also working in the spa are two female twins, neither of whom contributes much to the narrative other than being so aloof that we simply dislike them in general and even feel a small sense of relief when one of the coworkers tells Pinky, "We don't like the twins."
Far and away the most disjointed character in the movie is Willie Hart, played to near silent perfection by Janice Rule. Willie creates sand paintings on swimming pools and elsewhere and she is with child until the last few minutes of the film. She is married to a retired stunt man who used to work in cowboy pictures.
For all intents and purposes, these three women could all be different aspects of one another and when it turns out that Pinky's "real" name is Mildred, we are not terribly surprised, although we are properly disturbed, just as we are troubled by the rhyme of the name Willie. These three women have suffered damages and they continue to suffer them, on and on until the women seem to merge into a single unit, be it a nuclear family, a Manson Family, or a single person with three personas.
To say more about the story would be to risk divulging the narrow and winding plot. However, it pulls on me to say that dream-work in this picture is very much impressionistic, in the artistic sense of the word, a facet that is not uncommon in much of Altman's work. The Long Goodbye was rife with extended sequences that not only felt dreamy but which even drifted away from the Raymond Chandler novel enough to be their own reaction to having read the book. Even given the soft and deadly punch from the brilliant, instinctive acting of the three principals in this motion picture, the real performance remains the movie itself, at once loping along with all the time in the world just as it abruptly shifts to tense alignments that rustle the pulse. If you were to only view one Robert Altman film, it should beNashville. If you have the luxury of two, the second must be 3 Women.
