The Player (1992, Dir. Robert Altman)
Synopsis:
Studio executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) has good reason to be uneasy. He hasn’t had a success for a while and the news all over town is that Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), a young executive with a string of successes under his belt will soon be replacing him. Wherever Griffin goes Larry seems to be there as well. Further adding to Griffin’s paranoia is a succession of “poison postcards” — seemingly from a scriptwriter who Griffin didn’t get back to — threatening to kill him.
Looking through the files, Griffin thinks he knows who is responsible: an angry, young screenwriter called David Kahain (Vincent D’ Onofrio). He goes to his house and talks to Kahain’s painter girlfriend, June (Greta Scacchi), discovering that David has gone to the cinema nearby. He tracks David down and tries to reason with him, but David mocks Griffin — taunting him that Griffin’s career is over and that he will soon be replaced by Levy. A fight ensues, during which Griffin ends up killing David.
With the cops led by Whoopi Goldberg on his tail and the studio becoming nervous about the potential fallout of one of their executives being charged with murder, Griffin’s life sees to be spinning out of control. His only solace is a burgeoning romance with June. Can he escape arrest, save his job and keep the woman he’s fallen in love with in the perfect Hollywood ending? Or will he find out that real life isn’t anything like the movies?
Some films become “underrated” over time, despite their initial favorable critical reception. For me The Player is a classic example of this: On it’s first release, the film was a cause celebré — hailed as both a long-awaited return to form for Altman and trading heavily on the movie’s gimmick of having various famous movie stars play themselves as background extras. After the release of Altman’s even more critically lauded Short Cuts a year or so later (a film made possible by the success of this) and then subsequent regular and varied (in both success and quality) films from Altman throughout the rest of the 90’s and 00’s until his death in 2006, the movie seemed slowly to fade into the background… As is often the case, what had seemed so innovative, initially, soon seemed passé…
I saw the film in the cinema and dragged my Dad along with me to see it, such was the overwhelming hype about the movie when it was first released. I saw it at some point on tv or video a few years later, but was less enamored with it and it’s rambling anti-mystery plot the second time around.
After recommending Richard E. Grant’s fabulous book of film diaries, “With Nails”, to a friend who’d never read it and feeling the need to re-read it myself, especially it’s section about the making of this movie; I wanted to revisit the film again and as Criterion (the superb U.S. Deluxe DVD and Blu-Ray manufacturer) have just release a beautifully — restored version of the film it seemed the perfect time to do so.
Watching the film again, now that I’m far more familiar with Altman’s entire film oeuvre, I was struck by how closely it follows the pattern of Altman’s earlier work, such as The Long Goodbye, in that it uses the idea of a thriller as a loose framework to hang Altman’s ensemble mosaic of the Hollywood scene of 1990s. According to Richard E. Grant, the film was so indicative of the industry at the time, that one female studio exec was seen in tears after a screening and sales of Range Rovers (Tim Robbins character’s car) went down significantly after the film was released.
Another recurring theme of Altman’s work, is the idea of a seemingly weak and cowardly man lashing out with great violence when pushed to his limit. It features not only in Long Goodbye (Elliot Gould’s private eye suddenly shooting his best friend at the end of the movie) but also in the resolutions of Macabe and Mrs Miller, Quintet, The Gingerbread Man and one of the story strands in Short Cuts. It’s use here, when Griffin semi-accidentally murders the scriptwriter, David; is even more surprising due to it’s lack of foreshadowing and that Griffin is supposed to be the character we empathize with, if anybody…
The problem of who to empathize with is the most likely reason why this movie’s initial popularity hasn’t endured. Many of Altman’s film have suffered from a similar problem, though here it’s difficult not to feel that this is intentional. The characters here are all cyphers, rather than real people — Griffin Mill is as empty as the canvases of June, the painter whom he ends up falling in love with. Several characters describe him as an asshole and yet his behavior at the beginning of the film is mostly just mildly obsequious and rather vague — it takes the murder to galvanize him into any form of machevellian scheming and, in a sense, to become a fully rounded character.
The rest of the characters don’t even do that. Scacchi’s June is a case in point: she constantly tiptoes the line between ditzy and plain disturbed, in the tradition of the main character in Amelie or Geena Davis’ character in The Accidental Tourist — Women who in the context of another story would be portrayed as psychotic. Her every reaction defies what one would expect to be the rational response from someone in her situation. It’s almost as if she has been created as a plot device to assuage Griffin’s guilt — which in the larger sense is exactly what she is. Altman famously said this to Greta Scacchi , when she asked who this woman is: “She isn’t any woman” he replied, “she’s a figment of Griffin Mill’s imagination”. Were this any other film, you would put this down to poor character development or lazy writing, but in this context — through the looking glass of a film about films — it’s impossible not to see it as being designed that way, in the same manner as the detectives (and in particular Lyle Lovett’s character) as manifestations of Griffin’s feeling that he should be punished for what he’s done.
Altman has created a hall of mirrors that constantly reflects back in upon itself, from the opening tracking shot (which starts with the clapper board slating the scene) where numerous characters discuss famous movie tracking shots, to the last line of the movie which repeats the last line of the film-within-the film: This entire movie continually “echoes” itself. The initial pitch for “Habeas Corpus” — the ludicrously melodramatic film-within-a-film that Griffin ends up saving by giving it a happy ending — is summed up by the line: “that’s the reality, the innocent die”, which is what happens in this film; Fred Ward’s character constantly compares reality to films: “Witnesses are never reliable, look at Dietrich in “Witness For The Prosecution”…“ At the lunch meeting when Griffin asks his guests if they could talk about something other than movies, which has them all descending into gales of laughter when nobody can; even the lines between Griffin and June at the hot spring resort: “Do places like this really exist?”/“Only in the movies”.
As Altman himself states in the interview, included in the Criterion edition’s second disc of bonus features: “The Player is about itself. The end of the ‘The Player’ tells you… that film you have just seen is now the film we are talking about. That it becomes… that it turns on it self like a snail almost…eventually becoming sort of spherical”
I feel that this sense of continual self-reference extends to the film’s slightly maligned cinematography. Several critics complained that the film’s visual style was several notches of quality below the beautiful cinematic worlds created by the likes of Vilmos Zsigmond for Altman’s early work. It’s true, Jean Lapine’s work here is of a very different style and yet it’s important to remind oneself that the film’s choice of look is far from accidental. As with the characters, the cinematography’s attempts at realism don’t really convince: the overly dramatic red light on the pool of water that the writer drowns in, June’s house all bathed in blue and white, the police station that looks like a set, even the movie studio itself — this is TV movie realism and whether or not it was initiated due to the film’s budget constraints or not, it serves the story well. It’s important to note how cleverly the film merges the stylized scenes: the murder, the police station, June’s appartment with the more naturalistic, documentary feel of the party at Griffin’s lawyer’s house and the fundraiser — due to Lapine’s constantly moving camera and Stephen Altman’s (the director son) subtle, but very clever production design and the incorporation, as is typical on an Altman film, of improvisation of both dialogue and physical action.
Equally, Thomas Newman’s score — which even at the time I remember being intrigued by (though his score for American Beauty a few years later would be the big ear opener for me and would send me scurrying back to this and other earlier scores of his to check out what I’d been missing) — and mixes an old school film noir piano motif, jazzy undertones, weird underwater-like samples, percussion (the love scene between Griffin and June scored solely with percussion and moaning stuck with me for many years) does a similar trick of being both rooted in reality and capitalizing on the stylized elements of the film.
Ultimately, like many great movies — A slightly closer look or second viewing shows up umpteen missed moments and details. That should be enough to encourage you to revisit an Altman masterpiece, that somehow often seems to get forgotten in attempts to list his great works.
To appropriate the slogan of the studio featured in the film: this movie — more than ever…
At the time of writing there seems to be no Region 2 (UK/Europe) DVD still readily available and as the Criterion release is excellent and comes with a second disc of extras, that’s clearly the version to get hold of.
