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WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews

Robert Altman's Kansas City: Cynicism by default

By David Walsh
9 September 1996

Robert Altman's Kansas City is a sour and alienating meditation on American society, politics and art. It is an extremely unsuccessful film, but need it have been so? Many things would appear to be in the film's favor. Altman, at 71, is one of the most substantial and principled directors working in Hollywood. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Miranda Richardson--his two female leads--are undoubtedly talented performers. Each of the subjects Altman has chosen to consider--the jazz scene in Kansas City, the Depression, the Democratic Party, racism and race relations, the influence of movies and mass media on American life--is fascinating and worthy of attention in its own right. Yet the film fails to engage the spectator in any serious fashion. In making such a--one wants to say almost deliberately--dislikable film, Altman seems to have extended toward the viewing public the contemptuous attitude he adopts toward his characters. Or is it perhaps vice versa?

Set on election day in 1934, Kansas City revolves around the efforts of Blondie O'Hara (Leigh), a Western Union employee, to retrieve her husband, Johnny, who is being held by black gangsters for his part in the stick-up of a gambler. For leverage, she kidnaps wealthy Carolyn Stilton (Richardson) and attempts to pressure the woman's husband, a Roosevelt adviser, into using his influence with local politicians to free Johnny. The results are predictably disastrous.

Altman, a native of Kansas City, has said that the film "is structured like jazz." The music also forms much of its content. Musicians are on stage performing at the Hey Hey Club, where Johnny O'Hara is a prisoner of Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte), virtually throughout the twenty-four period treated by the film. From the club's balcony, a youthful Charlie Parker (born in Kansas City in 1920) watches the likes of Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins perform.

This is an Altman film and there are inevitably moments of insight and beauty. Belafonte's Seldom Seen--bitter, greedy, remorseless--is an excellent piece of work, obviously the product of much thought and effort. When one of his prize pigeons is robbed on the way to his gambling club, and by a white man in black face, Seldom Seen is propelled into motion. He tells the gambler, "You've been robbed by Amos `n' Andy." Nothing will satisfy him short of the ultimate (and orgasmic) act of vengeance.

In a small role, Michael Murphy brings a good deal to the character of Henry Stilton, the New Deal liberal--an anxious, teetotaling reformer, tied by a thousand strings to the party machine and its thugs.

The film's vices far outweigh its virtues. Her face made up like a mask, a red-painted mouth surrounding rotten teeth, Leigh's Blondie is grotesque, all twitches and grimaces. Blondie has borrowed her life (peroxide blonde hair, hard-boiled attitude) from Jean Harlow movies, particularly a 1933 picture, Hold Your Man, which she boasts of having seen six times. It is to Leigh's credit that she is prepared to portray such an unglamorous and charmless woman, but, in the process, she creates a character for whom one feels next to nothing. Richardson's Carolyn Stilton is an unstable socialite, addicted to laudanum, who staggers groggily through most of the film. The two women are unable to establish any genuine connection. When the two are alone at one point, Blondie asks a question. Carolyn responds, but the other woman cuts her off angrily: "I'm not talking to you." Carolyn looks around, "Who are you talking to?" "Myself."

Two sequences sum up the film's sourness and cynicism. In one, located at the film's exact midpoint, an all-night saxophone battle between Young (Joshua Redman) and Hawkins (Craig Handy) is cynically intercut with the brutal execution of a black taxi-driver--Johnny's accomplice in the robbery--at the hands of the gangsters. Seldom Seen, whose underlings stab the driver to death, tells a racial joke while the killing goes on behind him.

In the other, Blondie's brother-in-law, a ruthless Democratic ward boss, literally clubs a crowd of vagrants, brought from out of town, into the polling station to vote for the Democratic ticket. He tells them that they are going to exercise their "God-given right to vote." And they are "going to vote how I tell you to vote." When a bystander objects to the non-residents voting, he is taken aside and shot. When Carolyn registers surprise at the shenanigans--"The Democrats do that?"--Blondie replies, "This is America, lady."

Altman unfortunately brings too much of a 1996 sensibility to the telling of a story set in 1934. The result is a lack of historical perspective. The Democratic Party has surely undergone change in the past six decades. Was it necessary as a rule to club workers or the unemployed into voting for the party of the New Deal in November 1934? It was reformist illusions in the populace, rather than the use of physical coercion, which permitted the Democrats to consolidate their hold on Congress in that election. And what about the gathering storm in the factories? Altman is certainly not obliged to treat that, but it is open to question whether he has made a film accurately reflecting the social atmosphere of the time.

The emphasis in the election day sequences is not on exposing the claims of the Democratic Party to be the party of the "common man." That would be all to the good. It is rather on demonstrating that this common man is invariably a hopeless, and even willing, dupe of the powers that be. `Nothing has changed from that day to this; the little people are sheep; they get their ideas about life from the movies; politicians merely lead them around by the nose, etc., etc.' This is pretty trite stuff.

Altman's disgust with the electoral process is legitimate and no doubt sincere. But one can draw all sorts of conclusions from disgust. His musicians--presumably representing artists in general--simply ignore the chaos and tragedy taking place around them and play, play, play.

The filmmaker is not of course indifferent to the fate of humanity. Over the course of his nearly forty years directing films, Altman has movingly addressed many of the most pressing human problems. One thinks, above all, of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), California Split (1974), Thieves Like Us (1974), Nashville (1975), Three Women (1977), Vincent and Theo (1990), Short Cuts (1993).

It is instructive to compare Kansas City with Thieves Like Us, for instance, in regard to the attitudes of the two films toward their protagonists. Both are set in the Depression; neither film treats the period with sentimentality. In Thieves Like Us, however, it is the sympathetically-portrayed--and doomed--young couple, played by Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall, who occupy the foreground of the film. Corrupt and treacherous characters fill up the margins. In his newest film Altman treats only two minor figures, pushed well into the background, with genuine warmth: an adolescent Charlie Parker and the pregnant teenager he befriends.

Let us say that the director has been worn down over the years, and that this wearing down is somewhat understandable as the product of stagnant and reactionary times, his own personal battles with studios and philistines, the difficulties of making art within a mass medium. But Altman is ultimately responsible for the attitude he takes toward these problems and the degree to which he responds to the intellectual challenges of the day.

More than fifteen years ago a critic pointed to a recurrent pattern in Altman's films: "The protagonist, initially confident of his ability to cope with what he undertakes, gradually discovers that his control is an illusion; he has involved himself in a process of which his understanding is far from complete and which will probably culminate in his own destruction." The same critic, after noting a "disturbing" tendency on Altman's part "to look down on his characters," commented that the director "is perhaps closer to them than he realizes." This seems an astute comment.

Iconoclast, gambler, master improviser, Altman is a filmmaker who more often than not relies on his intuition to solve artistic problems. He has remarked, for example, that the idea for Three Women came to him in a dream and refused to offer any other explanation for that extraordinary, somewhat enigmatic, film.

Altman's method of work seems to consist in large measure of placing actors in situations which intrigue him and trusting that something engaging and truthful will emerge from their interplay. It often does. The limits of this approach are exposed in Kansas City. It is difficult to make a persuasive film about historical and social questions when one's understanding of history and society is not up to the task. Intuition truly takes flight only when it has solid ground beneath it.

If the truth be told, the chief difficulty with Kansas City is not cynicism as such. America is not, as a matter of fact, simply corruption and venality and brutality, and Altman knows that perfectly well. The real problem is that Altman doesn't understand a great deal of what's taking place before his eyes. He asks himself: why do Americans put up with all the thieves, hypocrites and liars at the top? Why do they swallow so much of the nonsense they are fed each day? Unable to treat these problems as historically-created, and, therefore, historically-soluble, Altman reaches for the thing which always lies close at hand, with which he is familiar and comfortable: a superior attitude toward people's difficulties. His cynicism is largely a cynicism by default.