Robert Altman by Frank Caso

Author:Frank Caso
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

7 Career Ebb

WITH A WEDDING (1978) Robert Altman played a game of Can-I-Top-Nashville? Over a four-year period his sound engineers, notably James Webb, had improved his Lion’s Gate 8-Track Sound system, and Altman set out to expand its use. Nashville had shown what he (and the multi-track) could do with 24 characters. A Wedding doubled that: 48 speaking characters overlapping, though usually only fourteen had microphones on them at a given time.

The most important aspect of the film was that it confirmed for Altman the viability of his ‘mural-film’ – his apologue. It was not the story, which after all is really just about a wedding, but the characters’ backstories – their secrets, their reactions to one another and their discomfort in the situation – that make A Wedding watchable again and again. Altman succeeded in turning the viewer into a wedding crasher, as invisible as the event’s hired help. For some viewers (and perhaps critics) the lure was satire, but A Wedding was not pure satire or simply a comedy of manners – by then any filmgoer clued in to Altman should have realized that he did not work in ‘pure’ forms. In fact A Wedding is primarily a farce, a genre much criticized over the centuries for its ‘impurity’. Under Altman’s direction it becomes even more impure, incorporating the above-mentioned genres. All of that, and the fact that the film covers an event whose duration is measured in hours, relieves it from any but the most comic sense of claustrophobia. In addition to the numerous storylines (the secrets) and the obvious technical aspects, A Wedding clearly references Nashville three times. The first reference seems offhand in that cars are choreographed. In the scene at the airport in Nashville various main characters, whether alone or in twos or threes, pull out of the car park simultaneously, briefly causing confusion and foreshadowing the highway accident and traffic jam that are to come. In A Wedding we see the opposite. The cars carrying the wedding party and families from the cathedral to the mansion enter the driveway and circle the central grassy rotary in a precision ballet that is shot from above. The second reference is the highway crash at the end of A Wedding and the beginning of Nashville. The third reference is the unexpected deaths at the end of both films. Some cinéastes may also have noticed that A Wedding contains more than a few parallels with Pietro Germi’s Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned, 1964), the Italian comedy about a father’s attempt to marry off his teenage daughter to the man who had impregnated her – her sister’s fiancé. And at least one commentator, Gerard Plecki, compared A Wedding’s satirical treatment of the American upper class to Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939).1 However, it would be nearly a quarter of a century before the director’s true homage to the Renoir classic appeared, Gosford Park.

The two families being united are the Sloan/Corellis and the Brenners.

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