The Maverick of Movieland; Robert Altman, 1925-2006
Byline: David Ansen
Robert Altman never courted an audience's affections. A cool, iconoclastic customer, he scorned sentimentality, upended the rules of genre, spurned happy endings. Why, then, did his best movies produce in me a happiness unlike anyone else's? Watching that magical string of films he made in the early 1970s--"McCabe & Mrs. Miller," "The Long Goodbye," "California Split," "Nashville"--was pure exhilaration. I'd walk out of the theater with a contact high, twice as alive as when I walked in. There was a paradox here that gets at the mysterious alchemy of art: though these movies end with wintry desolation, existential futility, happy-go-lucky fatalism, they …
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Publication information:
Article title: The Maverick of Movieland; Robert Altman, 1925-2006.
Contributors: Not available.
Magazine title: Newsweek.
Publication date: December 4, 2006.
Page number: 69.
© 2009 Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved. Any reuse, distribution or alteration without express written permission of Newsweek is prohibited. For permission: www.newsweek.com.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group.
This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.
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