Thieves Like Us

March 11, 2010 IMDB Comment: Hearing What You See

*** This review may contain spoilers *** I miss Altman. I miss the feeling of ease he allows.

Some films are work. Some aren't worth it, while you do all sorts of conceptual shuffling to follow whatever structure the filmmaker designs. Or in the worst case which has not been consciously designed so needs to be mastered without help.

But Altman doesn't create crystals with edges. He does not refract great truths. He simply observes. By this film, his technique of discovery is in full bloom. He never storyboarded or blocked a scene. He did not tell an actor where to go or look. He simply trusted the actors to inhabit their characters and trusted the camera to find them. The minimum was manufactured. This is dogma film-making before the oddly formed rigors of dogma were proposed to "free" cinema.

What is remarkable about this film is not simply the flow of the images and narrative, but that of the sound. "McCabe" was, I think, his first serious work in understanding how sound can bleed. Later, he (and Malick) would explore other effective techniques of soundweaving. Here, we have a simple but very effective device.

Most of the narrative comes not from what you see or are told. We hear the radio. We hear it when there is a radio turned on in the world we are watching. But we also hear it when our characters leave the world of repose and go do something. That something has a radio show — usually a crime drama — overlain.

The immediate effect is that these guys are not robbing because they need money, or for some philosophical purpose. It is because it gives them identity, and that identity is defined here by radio. Just as the radio allows the imposition of identity on those we watch, the idea is that what we watch similarly imposes on us. Much of what we see the characters do is measure how effective their adoption of character is.

"Bonnie and Clyde" was something notable among Hollywood films in 67. It advanced this notion a tiny bit, using a French film vocabulary. It will be hard to recognize that today because the French derived from Hollywood. Altman does a B&C that lasts, because his vocabulary is wholly original, discovered and adopted, not engineered.