The Heart of American Darkness

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Robert Altman's Short Cuts -- one of the season's most widely anticipated films -- opens with shots of helicopters, photographed so they look like giant bugs as they roar across the night skies, doing battle with a little bug, the Medfly, terror of the California fruit industry. This periodic chemical warfare, in which insecticides are noisily laid down across entire neighborhoods, is one of the minor, faintly comic annoyances of Los Angeles life. All that technology; such a humble and primitive foe.

The film ends with an earthquake rumbling across L.A. Such periodic seismic uproars are, of course, something more than an annoyance. There's nothing funny about them and no technology to fight them. They are nature's blunt reminder that life in L.A. is transitory, that the very ground under one's ! feet is not to be trusted.

The temblor shakes the lives of everyone still alive at the conclusion of the movie. But not more so than the events they have endured prior to it. Among the characters: the grieving parents of a little boy who dies mysteriously after a hit-and-run accident from which he calmly walked away; a group of fishermen who steadfastly pursue their sport despite a dead body floating in their favorite fishing hole; a woman who runs a telephone sex service while tending her children and sexually ignoring her husband (ultimately with terrible results); a wide variety of men and women who are cheating or have cheated on their spouses. These people mostly have bad jobs or no jobs. Some drink too much. Some are lonely. Some are depressed or angry. But all are "normal" in the faces they present to the world.

Everything about Short Cuts, which runs 3 hr. 9 min., recounts no less than eight stories and deploys 24 major actors, signals large aspiration and a desire to present a panoramic vision of life in what everyone is now pleased to think of as the heart of American darkness. Los Angeles, the city that has in a wink of history's eye ceased to be Everyman's Great Utopia, has become instead everyone's Great Dystopia.

Whether the film, which has the prestigious opening-night slot at the New York Film Festival this Friday, achieves its highest aims is likely to prove hotly debatable as it rolls slowly into theaters during the fall. L.A. is, after all, the world's easiest satirical target. Moreover, Altman and co- screenwriter Frank Barhydt are adapting -- freely commingling is a better description -- short stories by the late Raymond Carver. These have quite a different bleakness about them and are, anyway, resistant to the implicit cultural generalizations the movie tries to impose on them. Carver was content to capture discrete moments of confusion and loss in everyday, mostly lower- middle-class lives, rendered in spare, sparsely populated stories. His manner rigorously excluded direct emotional comment on the behavior of his people. Or, for that matter, ironic observations about it.