McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971)

A few weeks ago I reviewed Monte Hellman's existentialist anti-western Riding through the whirlwind.  I have watched another film in this slight and odd sub-genre: Robert Altman took a shot at making a western without most of the recognizable western themes with McCabe and Mrs Miller (even though one significant western theme is tackled: change). Not a bad movie (I keep thinking about the Coen bros grim and sometimes a bit elusive approach to movies) despite the rather obnoxious soundtrack by Leonard Cohen (Cohen croons a sad, sad song that adds yet another layer of sadness to the movie which is not exactly a sunbeam).

The film tells a story about small town in which McCabe, a rugged entrepreneur and gambler with some sort of bad-boy reputation, starts a business, a saloon and a brothel. The location speaks to me: its rawness, the drastic changes - and the weather always seems inhospitable (wait for the ending scenes and that landscape will get to you). The role the locations play here is not as a mere backdrop. Altman's approach to light enhances this sense of place. The camera drifts over cloud-heavy days and very dimly lit interiors. People's faces are barely seen, much of the action takes place among the shadows - and Altman's attention is sprawling in all kinds of directions, this is not the kind of movie that lets you into the main characters' heads. Strange jokes are told, sneers are made, people dance to a music box tune, somebody throws down a cat from a table. McCabe & Mrs Miller has Altman's personal style, the film is somehow drifting in some direction or other, not aimlessly, but not with a linear story either. We have to figure out what is going on and what we perceive to be central. Altman broods over business and entrepreneurship in a way that takes us a long way from the American dream. The growth and development of the town is not seen through the lens of hard work and heroic accomplishment - Altman adopts a mournful, slightly ominous tone. The film's plot is placed in the relation between McCabe and his partner Mrs Miller and the hookers they get to work in the brothel. These are broken, eerie human beings who don't seem to have much going for them. Altman takes his time to show us who these people are, and how they relate to one another. And many things remain obscure. There are business propositions and there are plenty of tragedies: in the end, everything seems to be about money. McCabe & Mrs Miller is about small fish trying to make a living, a bit of money perhaps and then the big fish with the power to destroy everything. Here's the mining company which can do what it wants to get the piece of land it has set its eyes on. But maybe this is not the worst enemy McCabe and Mrs Miller have: there's naivety, paranoia, dizziness, and strange, unexplained human need to appear in a certain way to others.