Away from Her

AWAY FROM HER        B+               

Canada  (110 mi)  2006  d:  Sarah Polley

Scenes from a marriage that play out like a Bergman chamber drama, filled with somber chilly undertones and brilliant performances from the leading actors, the resplendent Julie Christie who, as a member of the hospital staff points out, is still “a lady,” elegant and regal, smart and inquisitive, delivering one of the most powerful performances of her career, vulnerable yet always eloquent in her manner, and her husband Grant, Gordon Pinsent, an Erland Josephson stand in with the same beard, a retired English professor with a stern countenance, a stodgy old guy who taught Icelandic myths, always with a bit of frostbite in his look.  The two live on a cabin overlooking Lake Ontario where they enjoy cross-country skiing until one day Fiona (Christie) can’t remember her way back, a telling sign after several earlier signs all leading to the same truth, that she’s suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and needs long term care, announcing at a dinner party “I think I may be beginning to disappear” after she can’t remember how to pronounce the word “wine.”  After visiting Meadowlake, an upscale assisted living facility, Grant is devastated, expressed in an excruciating time lapsed scene when the residents are sitting around with their families, all crowded into a common room, but one by one the various family members disappear, erased from the image, leaving the residents isolated and alone, distraught and helpless, all common themes in the film.  Grant doesn’t like the place, but Fiona is wise enough to realize they’ll never find the kind of place they like, but this one will do, as what she really needs is a place where she can retain some sense of grace. 

Adapted by the director from the Alice Munro short story, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the film flows in intersecting threads, each intercutting the other, using brief flashbacks as well as spoken reflections from earlier times, all of which feed into the present, which is rapidly deteriorating.  The observant nurse, Kristen Thomson who is nothing less than a revelation in each and every scene, cheerful and helpful in every respect, empathizes with the family, whose time and visits are only fleeting, making it difficult to let go, a contrast to the staff administrator who is stiff and artificial, always remaining aloof from it all while enforcing the Meadowlake policy that forbids visitors of any kind for the first 30 days, allowing the residents time to settle in and discover their own comfort zones.  When Grant returns, she’s transferred her feelings of affection to one of the other residents, a nearly unrecognizable and uncommunicative Michael Murphy, who is confined to a wheelchair, the two becoming inseparable, treating Grant like a pestering visitor who won’t leave them alone.  Again, Grant who was never comfortable with the idea of bringing her there, becomes even more flabbergasted, feeling more alienated than he could ever imagine, as if forces were conspiring against him, believing she may be punishing him for a long since past indiscretion which may now be the re-prioritized focus of her attention.  Despite being heavily racked in guilt, he keeps visiting, trying to maintain his 44-year marriage, but he blends so comfortably into the background that one of the other visitors just assumes he’s a lonely resident without any visitors.  In an unusual scene, using humor to assess emotional devastation, one patient is a former hockey play-by-play announcer, who offers his amusingly unstoppable play-by-play commentary of his experience being whisked down the hall, interjecting upon seeing Grant hiding his face against a wall, “There’s a man who is heartbroken, his heart broken into a million pieces,” before continuing his monologue.  Throughout this ordeal, the role of the nurse takes on greater impact, where she possesses a kind of down-to-earth realistic clarity that Grant lacks, where all his education brings him no closer to grasping the effect of his sudden insignificance in his wife’s life.  There’s a wonderful conversation between Grant and the nurse when he realizes that much of what he previously felt mattered now feels so superficial, aware that what was a comfortable distance between them now feels like an insurmountable gulf.  This event is eerily similar to childbirth, only with an agonizing grief of loss instead of the joy of the newborn, where your life suddenly feels small and secondary to the more pressing needs of this “other.”       

While there are no startling directorial innovations or lapses, there are repeated motifs, such as the director’s preference for close ups, some lit in a glowing white light that suggests transcendence, hospital corridor sequences utilizing slow tracking shots that follow the eyes of a visitor, or an overhead camera looking down on inhabitants in bed, a similar Atom Egoyan device (a producer on the film), while most of the film takes place in the slow frozen chill of winter.  While there is a beautiful and tender use of K.D. Lang singing Neil Young’s song “Helpless”Away from Her & Helpless - YouTube (4:10), this is not a film with attention-grabbing fireworks or melodrama, but instead respects the slow descent into forgetfulness, where the dignity of the characters is maintained throughout.  There are wonderful literary passages Grant reads to his wife, with his eloquent, perfectly enunciated words, which adds a bit of poetic reflection, not to mention an appreciation for the written word, which after all is the sacred tool of communication.  Without it, we are all at a loss, caught in the emptiness of an unending void.  Even the Apostle John from the New Testament of the Bible recognizes this epic significance, “In the beginning was the Word.”   This film is a different kind of journey, one with no real political or religious message, but is a human story that anyone can understand, as it respects the ties that bind us together, the memories, the shared lives, an assembly of lifelong experiences.  So when all that suddenly vanishes and disappears without a trace, what are we left with?  How do we continue to know each other?  Anyone who’s ever visited the elderly in hospitals or nursing homes knows just how lost they can become from the rest of us.  How do we keep them from slipping away?  Of course, it’s “our need” to hold onto them, while in the later stages of life it may become “their need” to let go.  It’s a daunting distinction swallowed up in a fragile and ever elusive realm that is largely outside all human comprehension, and therein lies the unexplored territory that is the unusual focus of this highly intelligent and quietly tender film.  

Still Alice

STILL ALICE           B+              

USA  France  (101 mi)  2014  d:  Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland

Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America.  God, it’s been years since I was on a plane.  When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone.  I dreamed we were there.  The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening.  But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning.  And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired.  Nothing’s lost forever.  In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress.  Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.  At least I think that’s so. 

―Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika, 1993, read to Alice (Julianne Moore) by Lydia (Kristen Stewart)   

Any film that graphically depicts the harsh personal struggles of dealing with a debilitating disease is going to be a tearjerker and a challenge for the viewing audience, as it can’t help but make people feel uncomfortable, much of it bordering on real life horrors.  Up until now, perhaps the definitive film on Alzheimer’s Disease has been Sarah Polley’s Away from Her (2006), centered by such a superbly crafted performance from actress Julie Christie, where the essence of the film, featuring a slow descent into forgetfulness, is maintaining the dignity of the character.  Coming nearly a decade later, Julianne Moore is rather remarkable in conveying the deteriorating effects of losing her memory, especially considering she is the focus of every single shot throughout the entire film, where time plays such a significant factor, as she has such little time left where she can remember anything.  Written and directed by real-life partners, Richard Glatzer was diagnosed with ALS in 2013, where one imagines this may offer special insight and sensitivity toward the material.  Continually attempting to avoid cliché’s, what these two films have in common, besides powerhouse performances and such intelligent lead characters, is a delicate approach to the subject, where the overwhelming effect is revealed by the accumulation of tiny details.  Adding to the overall drama is the audience getting to know Alice (Moore) at age 50, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, a celebrated professor at the height of her career who specializes in the art of communication, where her entire focus in life has been elevated by her unique and uncanny ability to express herself and say exactly what she means.  When words start to fail her, it has stunning ramifications particularly in her case, because the more intelligent you are, the quicker the noticeable deterioration of dementia.  While she has a loving husband in Alec Baldwin as John, a biologist somewhat absorbed in his work, and three grown children, including aspiring doctor Tom (Hunter Parrish), expectant mother Anna (Kate Bosworth), and aspiring actress Lydia (Kristen Stewart, once again excellent), there is an existing family dynamic that becomes more evident as her disease progresses.

The film is based on Lisa Genova’s 2007 bestselling novel of the same name, where the author has a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard.  As Genova’s grandmother had Alzheimer’s disease, discovered in her mid-80’s, she became fascinated by the progression of the disease, wondering what it was like from the view of the person with Alzheimer’s.  Genova did a considerable amount of research and study on people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s when they could still describe their impressions of having the disease, reading every book she could find, interviewing neurologists, physicians, research scientists, genetics counselors, and social workers, while exchanging emails daily with people around the world living with early onset dementia.  Genova describes recollections of her grandmother in an interview with the Alzheimer Research Forum, Interview with Lisa Genova - Alzheimer Research Forum. 

We cared for her, but there was little we could do but watch this disease systematically disassemble the woman I knew as my grandmother. She didn’t know her kids’ names. She didn’t even remember that she had any children. She didn’t know where she lived. She couldn’t remember to go to the bathroom when she needed to. I would watch her looking at her own face in the mirror and not understanding the image she saw reflected back. She would care for these little plastic dolls as if they were real babies. It was heartbreaking.

As a result, the film gets the tiny details right, where more than 60% of Alzheimer’s patients are women, twice as likely to develop the disease upon reaching age 60 than breast cancer, and they are more likely to be the caregivers of those with Alzheimer’s.  While the film starts out with only minor incidents of forgetfulness, nonetheless Alice visits a neurologist on her own without telling her husband.  By the time John is brought in, the diagnosis has been confirmed, a rare incident of early onset dementia, where Alice is trying to come to terms with the inevitable while he’s in a state of denial and disbelief.  One of the most horrifying realizations is the extent of genetic transmission linked to their children, where the entire family is personally affected.  While she tries to maintain her independent lifestyle for as long as she can, she forgets pertinent subject matter during her lectures and eventually has to resign, where she’s seen exploring assisted living homes, where they assume she’s there on behalf of an elderly parent.  One of the most startling revelations in the film is the shame involved, as patients get lost, can’t figure out why, and can’t describe how they got there, as it’s an invisible disease with no cure, where Alice actually suggests she’d rather have cancer, as that’s at least something people can identify with.  Alzheimer’s patients simply disappear from their own known consciousness and are required to spend their lives in hiding, lost to their families and the people they love.  Alice has a modern family that is computer literate, doing much of their work on computers, while constantly communicating with each other on their cell phones, though Alice expresses her worries and concerns for her wayward child, Lydia, on cross-country skype visits.  One of the most effective devices used in the film is the grainy use of home movies, which serve as Alice’s reflections into the past, where over time she is unable to distinguish between the separate time barriers between the past and the present, where it all runs together into one stream-of-conscious present, often at odds with the “real” world.      

The marital dynamic is challenged in the extreme, as John is in his prime earning years, where this medical condition can last indefinitely and sap the family resources.  Knowing she has limited cognizance, she suggests they spend a year together in the remote isolation of a romantic locale by the ocean, as this may be her final year as herself.  In most families, this may not be economically feasible, which is John’s concern, especially as he’s being offered a prestigious once-in-a-lifetime position that he’s worked his entire life to obtain at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.  Believing he can’t turn down the offer, Alice has no interest in leaving everything that still remains familiar to her.  This kind of disruption is at the root of what families are forced to face when dealing with this disease, as it often comes so unexpectedly, where one’s life is literally turned upside down, where the patient requires 24/hours-a-day care, which is not inexpensive.  To ward off the inevitable for as long as she can, Alice relies entirely on her Blackberry, reminding herself of things to do while asking herself five questions every day.  When the day finally comes when she can no longer answer the questions, she instructs herself to go to her computer and follow the instructions of a specifically labeled file, where she has eerily left a message for herself, reminding her who she was, how smart she was, and what she needs to do next, simply a shattering moment that couldn’t be more heartbreaking.  The devastation of the moment is a poignant reminder of the personal deterioration, where it becomes harder if not impossible to maintain anything resembling a close relationship with someone who often no longer knows who you are.  Much of the film accentuates Alice’s strengths and unique abilities, where Julianne Moore, without being showy, offers the most nuanced performance of the year, showing a maturity in the role and a range of emotion few can hope to achieve, while also reflecting the kinds of difficult discussions family members must have in order to make the painful decisions involved, where they ultimately have to decide what to do with Mom.  Perhaps not surprisingly it’s Lydia, the wayward daughter, who beautifully channels a sense of “exasperated compassion,” where the film uses a Tony Kushner passage from Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika that rises to a poetic moment of shared transcendence, a wisp of humanity that truly challenges our role in dealing with these extraordinary moments of personal crisis. 

Don't Look Now

DON’T LOOK NOW        A-         
Great Britain  Italy  (110 mi)  1973  d:  Nicolas Roeg

A film that thrives on what’s happening under the surface, a mood of disaffected emotions, a series of endless searches, missed connections, various mediums, overlapping dialogue that sometimes fades out altogether, and deteriorating ancient relics that need restoration that may as well stand for the declining morals and deteriorating importance of the Catholic Church.  Adapted from a Daphne du Maurier short story from her book Not After Midnight, 1971, who interestingly wrote a letter to Roeg congratulating him on making such a strong adaptation of her story, this film was released in the same year as THE EXORCIST (1973), received some notoriety as an art film, for the sex scenes between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie who were offscreen lovers at the time, and remains downright gloomy to watch, with its icy disconnected emotions captured in the back alleys and canals and dark shadows under the bridges of Venice during winter.  The surface detail shot by Anthony Richmond as well as the director, also the over-the-top musical score by Pino Donnagio accentuates the unsettled psychological mood that only grows more macabre by the film’s end.  

Nicolas Roeg trained for twenty-three years in the British Film Industry before getting a shot as a director, starting out as an editing apprentice and camera operator for twelve years before getting the chance to work under infamous British director David Lean on the second unit photography for LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962), eventually becoming the lead cinematographer on Roger Corman’s THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964), François Truffaut’s FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966), John Schlesinger’s FAR FROM THE MADDENING CROWD (1967), and Richard Lester’s PETULIA (1968), before co-directing his first film at age 42, the legendary PERFORMANCE (1970) starring Mick Jagger in his film debut, amusingly voted best performance by a musician in a film by Film Comment in the September/October 2009 edition.  Roeg brought his own camerawork into Walkabout (1971), his first solo effort, a uniquely visualized, magnificently beautiful film.  Roeg’s films characteristically are beautifully filmed, where each shot displays a mastery of composition, framing, focus, and color qualities, breaking free from conventional film narration, exhibiting an experimental use of editing, creating an impressionistic film mosaic told out of time, challenging the viewer to understand the work as a whole, even as the fragmented parts may be puzzling to comprehend, heavily influencing modern era directors such as Christopher Nolan, Francois Ozon, Danny Boyle, and Steven Soderbergh.   

Innocently enough, the film begins with raindrops on a lake, showing the reflection of Christine (Sharon Williams), a little girl wearing a bright red raincoat playing around the water’s edge on a giant estate while her parents, art restorer John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie), sit in the warm comfort of their home oblivious to what’s happening outside, until suddenly and unexpectedly John races outside without any warning and discovers Christine’s body too late, as she has already drowned.  The scene shifts to Venice where the couple hopes a change of scenery will lift their grief-stricken spirits, where John is working on restoring a church, to the complete indifference of the Bishop.  Venice with its waterways is certainly an interesting choice to recover from the shock of a drowning, where it’s used as a location of eroticism and violence, while another is Sutherland’s impeccable unsubtitled Italian, which is prominently featured throughout, a subtle yet effective device to keep the audience in the dark.  Adding to this curious mixture, Laura meets two inseparable sisters, one of whom is a blind psychic that communicates with the dead, claiming their child is trying to contact them and warn them of imminent danger, a complete stranger accurately describing her physical appearance, which sends Laura in a swoon. 

John thinks these women with their séances are a bit daft and refuses to take them seriously, even after they are issued a warning that something terrible is about to happen to them, while simultaneously there are reports of recent serial killings in Venice, which doesn’t stop them from having a passionate sexual experience, a curious mingling of sex and violence.  The psychic mentions that John is a seer himself, though he may not yet understand his gift.  A call in the middle of the morning conveys the news that their son has had an accident in his school in England.  Laura takes the first flight back to England, but later that same morning, John sees her with the two sisters in a barge on the canals in what appears to be a funeral procession, but can’t understand why he hasn’t heard from her.  With news of a serial killer on the loose and his wife missing, he makes a police report implicating the sisters.  But just as baffling, he later receives a call from his wife in England reporting that their son is fine, which leaves John in a state of flux, as he could have sworn what he saw was real, yet what he mistakenly thought was the present may have been a vision of the future, a premonition of events yet to come, opening the floodgates for strange and mysterious occurrences that resemble the occult.    

From that point on, things appear out of a different supernatural dimension, where red deliriously begins to overwhelm the color palette, as John catches glimpses of a young child running around wearing his daughter’s red raincoat.  He politely walks the blind seer home from the police station where she was being interrogated, at John’s request, inexplicably abandoned by her other sister, setting in motion an investigation of an event that apparently never took place.  When the seer gets agitated, telling John he must leave Venice immediately, John leaves, but the psychic screams for him to come back as he disappears into the shadows outdoors, out of which Laura appears instead.  John catches a glimpse of the red raincoat, believing now this is the ghost of his missing child, and follows the trail up and down the dark walkways which remain otherwise eerily empty.  Oddly resembling a hallucination dream sequence drenched in a wafting fog, the murky atmosphere matches the deteriorating stability of John’s state of mind.  What happens next is shocking, one of cinema’s most terrifying climaxes, like the increasing waves of dread and anxiety in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), suddenly reaching a level of surreal visual hysteria that predates David Lynch, ending the film with a “life flashing before your eyes” sequence, as the brilliantly edited, disconnected pieces finally start to make sense in this collapsing world of psychological terror. 

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

MCCABE & MRS. MILLER        A       
USA  (120 mi)  1971  ‘Scope  d:  Robert Altman 

All you've cost me so far is money and pain...Pain, pain, pain...    

—John McCabe (Warren Beatty)

Traveling lady,
stay a while
until the night is over.
I’m just a station on your way;
I know I’m not your lover.

—Leonard Cohen, “Winter Lady” Leonard Cohen - Winter Lady  YouTube (2:17)

Much like jazz music, the movie western is uniquely American, born and bred in this nation, where there is a unique relationship with Americans to westerns, which took the world of television by storm in popular long running programs like Gunsmoke (1955 – 75) and Bonanza (1959 – 73), television staples of the 60’s and 70’s, where Altman actually directed some of these early episodes.  There are the Western purists, who tend to favor the traditional John Ford westerns, and there are the revisionists who attempt to break down the myths and stereotypes created by the exaggerated news coverage, hastily written dime store novels, and the first 100 years of cinema, often at odds with one another.  While John Ford lauded the bravery of a few rugged individuals that literally won the West from “savage” Indians and dreaded outlaws, where good triumphs over evil, paving the way for laws and civilization to follow, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) is often considered the first modern western, a grim, ultra realistic look quite ahead of its time without a touch of false sentiment, going against the grain with an unglamorous story that has little action to speak of, but could be considered an anti-Western, moving away from those immense landscapes of Indian wars, gunfights, stagecoach robberies, or outlaw shoot outs, narrowing the focus, becoming smaller in scope, literally exposing a defining moment when no heroes rush in to save the day.  Altman’s film follows in the footsteps and could certainly be described as an anti-western, where rather than focus upon the myths of the frontier or rugged individualism, the director takes a particular interest in re-defining period authenticity, imagining it as the messy business that it likely was, deconstructing myths while creating a scathing critique of American history, suggesting it was the “savage” and unchecked capitalism in the West that steamrolled over everything in its path, grabbing whatever it wanted through greed and brute force, where the conquering of the West is no noble ideal, but part of the inevitable movement of capitalism, the outward growth of economic power.     

While many traditionalists really despise this movie for not having the very elements that it admires in a western, especially heroicism, yet it’s one of the richest works in the entire western genre, where the gentle lyricism is unparalleled, often listed as among the greatest westerns of all time, #1 here, The 50 greatest westerns – Film – Time Out London, and #2 here: IMDb: Top 20 Greatest Western Movies of All Time (The Ultimate List ..., and #8 here:  Western - AFI: 10 Top 10.  While Ford mourns the passing of the frontier, and with it the loss of individual freedoms which make way for strengthened law abiding communities, Altman sees no healing spirit, but simply the lies of the western mythology, suggesting rural communities miles from anywhere only reinforce a feeling of abject loneliness and isolation.  What Altman values is tone and atmosphere above action, where this could be the most authentic representation of wilderness life and the most gorgeously poetic western ever made, filmed by Hungarian cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, whose earlier career had only included B-movies, making this his finest work, where Altman insisted upon a specific color palette to capture the look of an old photograph, briefly exposing the film stock to light in order to fade it, also using filters to diffuse the colors, and “to compliment the period, the set and the look of the people.”  Warner Brothers was furious with the original footage, but Altman blamed the Canadian film processing company, suggesting they could fix it in Los Angeles when they were done shooting.  Of course, there was no fixing it, as it was shot exactly the way Altman wanted it to look, leading to a rather contentious relationship with Altman and Hollywood studios after that. Shot entirely in British Columbia in and around Squamish and Vancouver, the town’s rustic buildings were painstakingly constructed by production designer Leon Ericksen, given an unfinished look where lumber is always left lying around on the side of the road, while rusty ore was dumped on the set to color the whole town, which is saturated in the region’s weather of relentless rain and snow.  When one thinks of the greatest use of snow in motion pictures, this film always springs to mind, especially in the amazing final sequence where it’s blended so naturally into the film’s aesthetic. 

Coming shortly after MASH (1970), where the director first used layered, multi-track sound, this is one of the more extreme uses of overlapping dialogue with multiple conversations going on at once where the audience has to pick and choose which ones to pay attention to, often hearing only bits and pieces, but that’s enough, as the keenly established atmosphere is the main thing, offering the audience a chance to eavesdrop into a piece of the American West in the early 1900’s.  Similarly, there are few utterances coming out of lead actor Warren Beatty as John McCabe that don’t sound a bit mumbled or lost in the various conversations, where he’s often captured humorously talking to himself, often inebriated, yet his overall thought process remains clear by observing his actions, where others usually defer to him or make space for him at a table.  Adapted by Brian McKay from the little-known 1959 novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton that is filled with western cliché’s, Altman places his own stamp on the film from the outset, setting his town in the damp and chilly rain of the Pacific Northwest close to the Canadian border instead of the dry and dusty deserts bordering on Mexico.  Here drowning in nature, it is always wet and cold, and later on it snows.  McCabe’s initial entrance as a lone man slowly riding into town over the opening credits wearing a giant bearskin coat is a classic Leonard Cohen McCabe & Ms Miller opening scene  YouTube (4:55), walking into a dark saloon, having a look around, and then returning to his horse where he brings in a red cloth that he neatly places over a table.  Before he is even halfway through, men are pulling up chairs.  Known only as McCabe, a gambler, the bartender (René Auberjonois) immediately starts spreading rumors about his alleged past, which includes shooting a man at a card game, warning the men “That man’s got a big rep boys, he’s got a big rep.” When McCabe sees the awe that this story inspires, he neither acknowledges nor denies the rumors, but uses it to enhance his elevated stature among the men.  One common element in western lore is the mysterious stranger is always portrayed as a man whose reputation precedes him.  Here it’s accompanied by the gloomy and prophetic voice of Leonard Cohen singing “He was just some Joseph looking for a manger.” Leonard Cohen: The Stranger Song - YouTube (4:57), music that perfectly matches the somber mood of the darkly lit scenery. 

McCabe’s big idea is building a saloon and whorehouse, with an attached bathhouse, and bringing prostitutes into the nearly all-male world of Presbyterian Church, mostly filled with builders, miners or prospectors, men used to working outdoors who rarely ever see a woman, much less take a bath, which seems compatible with images of a half-built town where structures remain unfinished throughout the film.  In this town, besides work, there’s little else to do besides drink, gamble, and partake in the pleasures of women, where McCabe brings in three of the most unrefined and ragged women on the planet that work out of outdoor tents, one with no teeth, another largely oversized, but they’re an instant hit in this scruffy town layered in mud and filth, though one is quickly seen stabbing a man with an unexpected ferocity.  Enter Mrs. Miller, Julie Christie, a sophisticated, take charge woman with a Cockney accent who arrives in town on a steam engine, bringing along a mail-order bride (Shelly Duvall) for a man who is soon stabbed to death for defending her from a man who thinks she’s a prostitute, inadvertently forcing her to become one, shown simply by eye contact with Mrs. Miller at the funeral.  McCabe & Mrs. Miller become business partners, a relationship born out of economic necessity, bringing in high-class prostitutes from San Francisco, as she knows he doesn’t know the first thing about properly taking care of the women or running a respectable business, but she needs his investment capital.  Of course, despite McCabe’s constant griping about “money and pain,” their business is a huge success, drawing interest throughout the territory, charging a dollar a girl, and a whopping $5 dollars for the madam of the house, Mrs. Miller herself.  The relationship between the two, who were lovers in real life, is particularly noteworthy, as it takes place almost entirely under the surface, where both are loath to admit their feelings and instead sit on opposite ends of the bar in near silence counting their daily profits, with McCabe never really admitting to his feelings except when he’s alone muttering under his breath.  While McCabe is quick to confess “Madam, I’m not here as a customer” when entering the premises, actually he is, as he’s quite simply amazed at what he sees, never believing that a bunch of roughnecks would ever be able to appreciate such classy elegance.  Of course he takes all the credit for building a successful enterprise, eventually drawing the outside interest of other potential investors, while privately he’s seen paying the $5 dollars whenever he needs the madam’s company.    

This is one of the first films to capture the visual poetry of the as yet undiscovered Terrence Malick, whose first feature BADLANDS (1973) was still two years away, as the rhythm of the film is consistently driven by the unique beauty of the imagery, where the golden interior lamplight in otherwise darkened rooms has a painterly detail that matches the extraordinary outdoor beauty of the natural landscape, where it looks like a town is built in the middle of a vast timber forest.  As the weather turns colder, the plot darkens, taking a bleak turn when two businessmen from a wealthy company show up interested in the nearby mining deposits, wanting to buy out all of McCabe’s interests.  They are simply baffled at McCabe’s uncouth business manner and can’t make any headway with him, as to their amazement he turns down their offers, leaving them little choice but to send in the hired guns to do the talking.  McCabe never realizes the full implications of his actions, always thinking he was negotiating, driving a hard bargain to up their price, but Mrs. Miller is more astute, telling him you don’t say no to men like that, and she fears for his life, knowing at any minute that the next men riding into town could be the killers.  By the time McCabe sees the error of his ways, the businessmen are long gone, leaving behind an oppressive emptiness of fear and dread, which is a signal for the snow to fall.  In the wintry landscape, filled with an ethereal silence, the hand of fate is about to call John McCabe’s bluff.  How it plays out is what separates this film from other westerns, as the suspense is palpable, but the unique beauty is a joy to behold, showing Altman at the peak of his creative powers, bringing all the forces together in a snowy choreography of doom, allowing nature to take its course.  Snow falls steadily throughout the finale, showing at first a heartbreakingly senseless death of an innocent, which is just a prelude for the main course, told with a wordless precision, including an apocalyptic fire that threatens to destroy the entire community.  Altman brings us back to the Western myth, of an ultimate showdown between the individual pitted against the threat of more powerful forces, where it’s hopeless to think he can win, as hopeless as Gary Cooper in HIGH NOON (1952), or Alan Ladd in SHANE (1953), iconic moments in Western mythology, breaking new grounds here where all hope gives way to an inevitable end of Manifest Destiny.  While the town rejoices in saving itself, reminding us there is power in numbers, they’re cluelessly unaware of the fight taking place in their midst, where exhilaration soon gives way to an exhaustive and mournful death of the frontier myth, where a man is undone by refusing a business deal and believing in the mistaken notion that he is a gunfighter, a hero despite himself, whose heroic actions are never seen by anyone, who dies for no noble purpose or higher cause, but for absolutely nothing, shown here in the sad and devastating, yet magnificent ending sequence McCabe & Mrs. Miller - Finale YouTube (4:18).