One of the most celebrated American filmmakers of the latter half of the 20th century, Robert Altman was one of a kind. Even among the decidedly individualistic crop of New Hollywood filmmakers, he stood out. His films took familiar genres like the private eye genre, “The Long Goodbye” (1973) the buddy comedy genre “California Split” (1974) and, in the case of, “McCabe & Mrs. Miller”, the western, and slapped a new coat of paint on them.
Altman was notorious for caring more about characters than stories. People fascinated him – in particular their quirks, their flaws and the way they carried themselves. The story was, mostly, always there – though, I confess, I couldn’t make heads or tails of “Brewster McCloud” (1970) – but, it was the peculiar people who populated his films that were his main focus and interest.
He loved to hear his characters talk – he often prioritized characters talking as they would in real life (over one another) over being able to understand every word that was said. At the same time, images were just as important, as many of his films were jammed with memorable shots. The great Vilmos Zsigmond shot MAMM, after all.
The McCabe in “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” is John McCabe (Warren Beatty) – a businessman, he insists. Coming to the Pacific Northwest mining town of Presbyterian Church, sometime in the late 1800s, McCabe immediately begins building his modest empire – a saloon, brothel and bath house. Trouble is, he doesn’t know what he’s doing – within days, one of the three prostitutes he bought attacks a client with a knife.
Enter Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), a tough talking, super sharp lady of the night with a thick cockney accent and no time for bullshit. She has come from the town of Bearpaw to see McCabe. One of the first things she tells him is that she can see right through him. It’s a great little moment, shortly after she’s arrived in town, when the two are seated in the saloon of Sheehan’s run down hotel. Leaning forward, Mrs. Miller puts it to him plain – if he wants people to think he’s a “…fancy dude…” he needs to stop wearing such cheap cologne. In other words, she literally smells a fake.
Transitioning from insult to advice, Mrs. Miller offers McCabe a partnership. At first, he rebuffs her – his surplus of confidence is his worst trait. Then, after listening to her detail the many potential problems that a brothel owner should be aware of and should have a plan for, he gives in. Her obvious expertise in the procuring and maintaining of a stable of comely ladies is even too obvious for the dense McCabe to miss.
Sure enough, a batch of much more attractive, and much more mentally stable, prostitutes soon arrives and McCabe’s business quickly takes off.
Yet, McCabe, like so many men locked up in a cell of their own macho assumptions, will stumble again, soon. You can count on that.
Right off the bat, we know this is not going to be a typical western. How could it be? This is Altman Country, afterall. Before we lay our eyes on our protagonist, we see a shot of a wooded area, as the camera slowly pans right and the credits slide left. Over these simple images, the sound of the gentle guitar and voice of Leonard Cohen fills our ears. Known as the balladeer of the blahs (ok, I just made that up), Cohen made music that was sombre, deeply reflective, and, at times, stunningly beautiful. Decidedly on the sadder end of the emotional spectrum, Cohen, himself, once remarked that his albums should come with complimentary razor blades. His music, previously seen as exclusively contemporary, works beautifully with Altman’s downbeat images of rainy 1800s rural America.
A man comes into view – it’s McCabe hunched over on his horse. Behind him is a mule carrying his supplies. Making his way through a rocky-muddy trail as a steady rain soaks his ridiculously massive fur coat, McCabe looks miserable and defeated. The music, the rain, McCabe’s posture and the look on his face suggest nothing other than loneliness, exhaustion and death.
At first glance, Presbyterian Church looks like a wreck – no order to the buildings, wide areas of mud and rock littered with pieces of lumber of various sizes. Of course, the rain doesn’t help. Sheehan’s Hotel, which is the first place McCabe will visit, looks, from the outside, not so much like it has seen better days, but, rather, that it never had any to begin with. As for the people, well, their faces are grimy and their clothes are colourless, ill fitting and baggy – their miners afterall. All these early snippets clump together to create a collective image of a life of struggle, defeat and decay.
Add all of that up – Altman setting the scene – and you know you are in for a film that won’t be shovelling any bullshit fantasies your way.
As the pieces of the story fall into place, we are left with a man, out of his depth, whose insecurities and chauvinism keep him from grabbing on to the one life preserver tossed his way. Gone are the days when the man at the centre of all the action knows exactly what he is doing – McCabe is clueless. Instead, Altman shines his lights on a man who doesn’t know himself or, more appropriately, refuses to know himself. That willful ignorance will be swept aside soon and not in a way that McCabe will like.
Yet, in the film’s most crucial moment, where McCabe zigs instead of zags and, consequently, brings holy hell down upon him, you could argue that he had every right to push away that one life preserver. He’s his own man. He’s bold and adventurous. This is the Old West, afterall – a time of risk taking and courage. And, isn’t that the most important characteristic of any hero in any traditional Hollywood Western – courage? There’s just one problem with that argument – it’s not courage that McCabe shows in that crucial moment, it’s ignorance. He was playing a game without caring enough to learn the rules. Or, maybe, more accurately, he thought he already knew the rules – that may be more of an indictment of him than not caring to learn them. Either way, because of this miscalculation, he has needlessly put himself in a heck of a hellish situation.
Throughout, Beatty and Christie make for a great team. Instantly combustible, their back and forth makes for great entertainment. It also serves to highlight McCabe’s naivete and Mrs. Miller’s world weariness. Contrast her first impressions of McCabe with Sheehan’s. When McCabe first steps into his dank hotel, Sheehan acts with immediate concern. After hearing his name, he quickly tells his customers that McCabe is a dangerous man who shot and killed another dangerous man with whom no one wanted to cross paths. There’s a fear and respect that McCabe is accorded by Sheehan and the locals that is totally absent in his first meeting, and subsequent dealings, with Mrs. Miller. She instantly sees through him. There is myth and then there is truth – the men eagerly swallow the former while the lone significant female character puts her money on the latter.
Christie is terrific as the feisty and tough minded Mrs. Miller. She nails the cockney accent and the character’s quick to anger nature. My guess is that nature must have been, at least partially, shaped by being dismissed, time and again, by men as equally inept and ridiculous as McCabe. A trace of softness does surface in the character, but only after smoking up a batch of opium.
Keith Carradine stands out in a small role. He plays a young, gregarious cowboy who comes to Presbyterian Church to sample Mrs. Miller’s girls. Feeling like he’s died and gone to heaven, he’s all smiles and exuberance as he hops from one bed to another. In his other scene, he runs into his opposite – a nasty little fella with eyes full of hate and a head full of rage.
Part deconstruction of the hero we’ve seen stride across many a widescreen Western frame, part celebration of the collective and a full on character study of the mismatched duo from the title, MAMM offers few moments of lightness and hope. In its place, the frame is filled up with exploitation, cruelty and plenty of killing. In other words, the America of the 1800s is not that much different from the America of the 2000s – sanitation and technology excepted.
