Tonight the Oscars will award Robert Altman’s career with an Honorary Oscar. While it’s nice to see him join the company of other extremely deserving recent winners like Michelangelo Antonioni, Chuck Jones and Blake Edwards, the honor can’t help but carry with it a whiff of irony. Each win (and there will undoubtedly be at least three) for the most irritating, shrill knock-off of the Altman template, Paul Haggis’s Crash, will put a lot of sting into the fact that Altman hasn’t yet won a “real” Oscar, and neither of his nominations for Best Picture (Nashville and Gosford Park) have even been anywhere near as close to winning the trophy as Haggis’s million-slur baby.

I’ve written about Altman a few times at Slant, and I am loathe to say that I didn’t get the chance to actually re-watch any of his films in the last few weeks in preparation for his honor. I was considering writing a little bit about one of my most cherished cinephile memories of the last few years: the handful of then-unavailable-on-home-video films at an extensive Altman retrospective at Minneapolis’s Oak Street Cinema, which included one or two I wrote about on earlier incarnations of my movie journals, and additionally my first viewings of The Long Goodbye, Brewster McCloud and 3 Women. But, as you can clearly see on that link (at least until this Thursday), irony strikes once again as the struggling Oak Street has apparently been reduced to booking whatever second-run mainstream movies they can snare from whichever distributors to whom they aren’t currently in major debt. This weekend they’ve booked… Crash.

I’m sure you understand my predicament, approaching an Altman blogpile with the resignation of “too little, too late.” Still, as I scanned through DVDs looking for an appropriate screencap or two, I was reminded of just how often, among many other recurring actors, Shelley Duvall appears in Altman’s ’70s films. And how odd it is that she never again appeared in an Altman film following Popeye. Rumor has it that Altman reacted to Duvall’s stint getting systematically dismantled by Stanley Kubrick on the set of The Shining by grunting, I suppose with resignation, “she’s a different actress.” But, for a period, she seemed like Altman’s secret favorite. She first appeared in 1970′s Brewster McCloud (which I don’t have handy to screencap), rescued from behind a cosmetics’ counter in a Houston mall by Altman, and then again as one of Julie Christie’s prize honeys in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971).

But it wasn’t until ’74′s Thieves Like Us (which still sits unwatched on my DVD shelf) that the extent of Altman’s respect for her bizarre photogeniety really picked up traction. She’s coquettish.

She’s earthy and weatherbeaten. (And, as I’d forgotten, a dead ringer for Nashville‘s Ronee Blakely. Why did he never cast them as sisters?)

She’s sexy in a rough-hewn, Bertolucci way.

She’s implosive and tense.

And, ultimately, she’s devastating.

When it came to Nashville (1975), I didn’t know what to think of it when I first saw it. For starters, the pan and scan VHS did Altman’s panoramic mélange no favors, and I couldn’t particularly see why it was that some people (specifically Shelley Duvall, who was about the only actor I was strongly familiar with at that early point) seemed so marginalized and peripheral. The more times I saw it, eventually leading up to my first viewing in its correct aspect ratio on DVD (a viewing that launched the film up to the number one spot on my list of all-time favorite films back when I’d still rank such things), the more I understood exactly how Altman was using L.A. Joan: the talentless, scenester flip-side of Barbara Harris’s sun-fried runaway-cum-secret superstar Albuquerque.

Also, I was probably put off by the fact that, back in those pre-teen years, I struggled with hair that wanted to do what L.A. Joan needed a wig to accomplish.

If there was any lingering doubt that Altman had a very special place in his fickle heart for Duvall, the proof was in Buffalo Bill and the Indians‘ pudding. Sure, it was an even smaller role than she had in Nashville, but the role was as the First Lady!

She introduces a piece of music that would bring Buffalo Bill’s bourgeoisie and Sitting Bull’s rebel together. It’s because she introduces it that we understand its importance.

Duvall’s greatest role and maybe even her greatest performance (I hesitate because I have to grudgingly admit that Kubrick’s domestic abuse really did bring something special out of Duvall) came in 1977′s 3 Women, a movie I already wrote about at length at Slant, though I have to caution that it’s not at all one of my most insightful reviews. Disappointing, actually, but maybe there’s something to Matthew Wilder’s theory that some films are too close to be able to criticize lucidly. He writes: “I am tempted to say that this degree of love for the film should disqualify me from evaluating its merits objectively; for me, it’s not so much a movie as it is a living thing.” Anyway, Duvall’s performance as Millie in the first hour-plus-change walks an incredibly difficult line, having to convey a sense of social isolation…

… that she won’t even let herself be fully cognizant of, lest her pretense towards cosmopolitanism crash down around her along with any shred of self-esteem she can still retain. But she also has to offer something attractive to Sissy Spacek’s Pinky.

It’s Altman’s creepiest film, and Duvall’s way with firearms…

… is only matched by the startling fury she unleashes upon Pinky when she feels her psychological-classist status being usurped by the upstart.

But her anger is understandable, as it’s the first indication that she’s really truly aware of her own tragic social reality. I’m sure we’ve all had a Millie in our lives. I remember this one girl in high school. She wasn’t anywhere near as pretty (even in Duvall’s goofy, macademia nut-head way), but her saving grace was that she was too dense to realize that not all the attention she received from other classmates was inherently positive feedback. She processed sarcasm and direct insults as the sort of teasing that meant you were popular. She was also a little bit sexually regressed. One time she brought a pan of homemade brownies to our church youth breakfast club (every Friday morning at Denny’s, where I’d try yet again to order a strawberry-banana medley only to have the waitress come back and tell me they were out of bananas) and only offered them to the girls at our table. Not that I’d have eaten them, but still… Like, “what are you, eight years old?”

For 3 Women, Duvall won the Best Actress award at Cannes, and later won the same citation from the L.A. Film Critics’ Association. I can only hope she wore her L.A. Joan wig to accept the award.

Olive Oyl.

I don’t know what would’ve led to Altman expressing any concern over Duvall’s difference as an actress, unless he was really so territorial about his Houston catch that he thought any outside influence would end up “tainting” her “essence.” But even if that were the case, there’s no accounting for why he would ever be displeased with Duvall’s Oyl, easily one of the most perfect matches of actor with character in all cinematic history. For starters, Popeye represented the first (and still only) example of Duvall attempting to act with her body. Some of her awkward choreographed moments actually come off stunningly balletic.

In fact, the about face between Shelley Duvall in the ’70s (which also includes her underrated, underseen performance in Joan Micklin Silver’s Bernice Bobs Her Hair) and Shelley Duvall in Popeye/The Shining is as amplified as the gulf between Faye Dunaway before Network (The Thomas Crown Affair) and Faye Dunaway after (Mommie Dearest).

Also, she looks good in red.

As an addendum, and to bring the spotlight back to Altman again, there’s been a little bit of conversation at various Oscar-centric forums over what song the orchestra should play to bring Altman out on stage for his (hopefully cantankerous as hell) acceptance speech. Obviously “I’m Easy” would be an… um, easy choice, as it represents the only Oscar yet won by an Altman film. Others presume “Suicide is Painless” would probably be unavoidable, as it’s the closest to a standard he’s connected with. (Even if it’s ubiquity comes from the television show.) I wouldn’t mind hearing one of Annie Ross’s tunes from Short Cuts (or even her daughter’s cello practicing the “Berceuse” from Stravinsky’s Firebird). For a man of Altman’s stature, they really ought to give him something grand like the trumpet processional from A Wedding.

But I think I’d like it best of Shelley Duvall’s Paul Thomas Anderson-revived “He Needs Me” emanated from the Kodak orchestra pit. That or Robin Williams’ still-neglected companion piece from Harry Nilsson, the incredibly sweet Swee’Pea’s Lullabye. I think even someone as crusty as Robert Altman might feel a tear come to his eye at the sound of either song.

• Inside the Actor's Steez

Posted by Eric on Sunday, March 5th, 2006 at 3:17 pm.