The Heart of American Darkness

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Altman, in contrast, is an exuberant inclusionist. His best and most characteristic films (MASH, Nashville, The Player) teem with characters bouncing from one level to another of multilayered stories that are full of chance encounters and crazy coincidences. "There's something about this mural-type film that interests me," he says simply. It was -- what else? -- chance that brought Altman to Carver. He asked his secretary for reading matter for a transatlantic flight, and she provided several collections of Carver's stories. Dipping in and out of them as he dropped in and out of sleep, Altman found that by the end of the flight they had all homogenized. "I really couldn't remember one from the other," he says. But he did realize, "My God, this is a movie." Specifically, an Altman movie.

Maybe Altman gives Carver's people more interesting or eccentric jobs than they originally had; maybe he condescends to them occasionally; maybe one story that is his own and Barhydt's invention is melodramatically overweening. Nevertheless, this movie works. In part, that's because Altman and Carver do share one important characteristic: short attention spans. They like to touch a moment and move quickly on. True to his title, Altman does not linger on any of his stories. Nobody is ever on long enough to grow tedious, and his linkages between stories (the screenwriters used color-coded file cards pinned to a bulletin board to keep them straight) are wonderfully inventive and set up very curious resonances. "I kind of wish it were shorter," says Altman, "but this is what it is. It's like having a kid who's seven feet tall. What do you do? You buy him a new bed and hope he can play basketball."

If Altman's impatience with conventional narrative animates his film, so does his patience with and trust of actors. He's always been a man who encourages his performers to riff on a script's themes, and they respond with astonishing brio. "This movie was like a symphony, with Bob serving as the conductor," says one of his featured players, Matthew Modine. "It created a tremendous amount of pressure because you have to understand where you're at, when you come in, and what your role is. It's like a musician standing in front of these two big timpani drums. All he may have to do is hit them two times, but there's a tremendous potential for missing his cue and throwing everything off." Says Altman: "These parts aren't found in everyday movies. Here, suddenly, the actors can really create a character and play the moment, without worrying that they have to murder someone in the third act."

It may be unfair to single anyone out of this extraordinary cast, but the lunatic self-assurance of Tim Robbins as a motorcycle cop stealing his own children's dog (he hates the mutt), conducting an affair and covering his absences with tall tales of undercover drug investigations is hatefully hilarious. His braying boldness represents one emotional extreme in the picture. The other (the one that touches the most lives, and whose story is structurally the center of the film) is played, with great delicacy, by Andie MacDowell and Bruce Davison as the couple trying to cope with their child's hit-and-run accident.