The Player

In The Graduate, Part II Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross would be back as Ben and Elaine - married and living together with Anne Bancroft's Mrs Robinson, who has had a stroke. Graduate screenwriter Buck Henry manages to insert Julia Roberts into his pitch, as the couple's daughter. It's 1992, and Julia Roberts is somehow being finagled into everybody's pitch in The Player - a watershed film for Robert Altman who had spent over a decade in big budget/big movie exile after a series of films that lacked commercial appeal. It must have seemed especially sweet that this popular success set about critiquing the Hollywood process - whereupon profit always seems to come at the expense of quality storytelling and novel ideas. It's a film that is absolutely as relevant today as it was back in the early 1990s.

It opens with a bravura 8 minute shot that zooms out from a painting, out of an office and through studio streets, stopping at intervals at the window to the office of Tim Robbin's Griffin Mill. Mill is an executive who spends his days listening to screenwriters pitch ideas to him, a job that puts him at odds with the artists of the filmmaking crowd - out of the thousands he listens to he can only greenlight but a few - so he'll rarely get back to many hopefuls out there who believe they have a great idea. One of these hopefuls is sending postcards to Griffin Mill, with spiteful death threats written on them. Under job pressure from newcomer Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) a stressed Mill hunts down the most likely suspect, David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio) after speaking with his girlfriend June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi). Mill and Kahane fight, and in a fit of rage Mill kills what turns out to be the wrong man.

It's the metaphorical battle between the creative and commercial, and later in the film a pitch is made to Griffin for a film called Habeas Corpus that will tell us in a somewhat comedic fashion who usually wins these battles - with even a screenwriter (played wonderfully by Richard E. Grant) swayed by avarice and gladly stepping all over his own artistic integrity in the end. Director Robert Altman points his finger at the greed responsible for the decay of soulful righteousness in the movie business. Griffin Mill is a sympathetic figure amongst all of this however - an especially difficult job for Tim Robbins to pull off. In this film it's not the person - it's the job. Intelligent, softly-spoken, good-natured and thoughtful, but also ruthless, he's no saint and he is guilty of murder but somehow we're always on his side. Robbins had shaken off appearances in horrible films such as Howard the Duck to appear in Jacob's Ladder (a critical, but not a financial success) and Bob Roberts (which he also wrote and directed) just before really making his mark here.

Griffin will go on to court June, which does himself no favours inasmuch as how guilty it makes him look - the police (led by Whoopi Goldberg as Detective Avery) are suspicious, but industry insider Walter Stuckel (Fred Ward) is looking out for him. Surrounding all of this is the glamour and heady glitz of Hollywood - the celebrity cameos in this film are so numerous that it wouldn't be possible to mention them all here. Cher, Nick Nolte, Burt Reynolds, Andie MacDowell, Rod Steiger, Jeff Goldblum and Jack Lemmon all make an appearance, amongst many, many more. It gives the film a heightened sense of reality, not to mention that it's simply enjoyable to spot these faces in the crowd as if we're amongst all the celebrities - living vicariously through Griffin Mill. These stars were generous enough with their time to appear for little to no pay, probably because Altman, a popular figure as far as actors were concerned, was directing. Late in the film the 'movie within a movie' Habeas Corpus features Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, Peter Falk and Louise Fletcher.

Altman would be nominated for an Oscar for directing this film, but surprisingly the film itself wasn't nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award. He does a tremendous job, and I think there could have been nobody better at the helm of this particular film - Altman was "anti-Hollywood" and a non-conformist, a person this film really needed to guide the way. Geraldine Peroni was nominated for editing the film, and I have to remark that the editing in The Player is indeed exceptional, especially in a transitional sense - giving greater impact to foreshadowing and the multi-layered humour in the movie. It would be her only Oscar nomination, despite her putting together Brokeback Mountain. Cinematographer Jean Lépine was surprisingly left out of consideration, but perhaps I'm focusing too intently on that opening shot, which must have been horrendously difficult to rehearse and get just right (I think 15 takes were shot, with the 10th being used in the finished film.) I recognize Thomas Newman's score nowadays as having that kind of American Beauty signature - along with, in this case, small samples of the kind of music older films once had - sometimes sounding like two tunes, one layered over the top of the other.

Screenwriter Michael Tolkin was basing this on his own novel, first published in 1988, and was generous in allowing changes to be made although for the most part it follows along fairly true to the original source. In the novel Mill is less sympathetic, and of course readers are allowed into the main character's head (I hear he has a contempt for cinephiles!) His Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay rounded out The Player's three nomination, Tolkin losing to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's adaptation of Howard's End. Robert Altman ended up losing to Clint Eastwood, who directed Unforgiven, and Geraldine Peroni to Joel Cox who edited that same Eastwood film, which probably would still have beat The Player for Best Picture if it had been nominated. The nominations as a whole were good for Robert Altman however, giving him long overdue recognition and the impetus to write and direct Short Cuts. The Player was an all-round success, faring well at the box office as well.

What I especially enjoyed in The Player were the references to certain films themselves. Mills initially meets David Kahane at a showing of Bicycle Thieves* - my favourite foreign language movie of all time. A detective played by Lyle Lovett talks about seeing Tod Browning's Freaks. The long opening shots of Absolute Beginners and Touch of Evil are discussed (during the long opening shot of this movie - in a very clever way, this film is referencing itself.) Posters for the likes of Casablanca and King Kong adorn walls. Films like D.O.A. are discussed and the likes of Sunset Blvd. are cleverly alluded to ("Anybody know who Joe Gillis is?") Like the celebrity cameos, it would be difficult to recall all of them here - but most of them are films I love very much, and they obviously also mean a lot to the filmmakers. They would also have known how much film lovers would enjoy seeing and hearing about all these references to their favourite films. It all adds to an already enjoyable story that has a mix of black comedy and film noir.

When the ending rolls up, I'm very much reminded of Adaptation, a film that would come along a decade later. Adaptation references it's own making, and in a sense so does The Player - The postcard sender calls Griffin Mill again, and gives him a pitch for a film which is basically everything that has happened so far - calling his film "The Player", and as long as Mill greenlights it, it will have a happy ending, which this film has. It's one of the more satisfying endings I've seen in mainstream moviemaking, and ties up the film very neatly (apparently this ending was Tim Robbins' idea.) It's the kind of film where the humour is sly, and where I don't laugh out loud but watch with a grin on my face - because I just know that not only is this silliness actually close to what Hollywood is really like, but in some cases it's probably even worse - and Robert Altman has said as much in interviews. It's one of the more interesting films to learn about, as there's always some new inside joke or cameo to discover, but it's story is just as engaging by itself. Before seeing it, I'd always assumed that it was a square-on comedy - but it's a lot more than that. The satire is more straight-faced than I thought it would be.

I haven't seen nearly enough Robert Altman films - but what I have seen I have a deep appreciation for, especially McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us and Brewster McCloud. I'll add The Player to that list, for there are many different ways to enjoy watching this again - from admiring it from a technical and filmmaking standpoint, noticing new little details and cameos in the background and just watching to enjoy the story. Altman hasn't created something here that's mean-spirited or depressing, instead he lets us be seduced by what is ever so seductive about Hollywood - giving us glimpses inside and showing us why we should all admit to ourselves that the machine cranking out soulless films for mass consumption are part of an obsessive quest to give "the audience" exactly what they want. At one stage Larry Levy ponders leaving the screenwriter out of the process altogether. It's a democratic process, and we vote with our money. If we want Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis with a happy ending then why even bother making an artistic statement? It makes so much sense that a producer kills a writer in this film, before getting his happy ending - something even studio executives watching the film must have got.



* A producer watching dailies thought that Altman and co had made Bicycle Thieves as a 'film within a film' - having never heard of it.