Fad King

Spoiler Alert: Review contains some plot elements.

I had seen this movie described as an "anti-western," a term I didn't really understand until I actually watched the movie. Director Robert Altman completely guts this movie of any traces of the iconography of the movie western that had developed up to this time. There are no white hats vs. black hats, cowboys and indians, haunting sunsets, heroes standing up for justice, or virginal and/or madonna-like women helping civilize the frontier. All of this pleasant mythology is replaced by whores, liars,sociopathic murderers, opium fiends, a bleak winter landscape, and a "hero" driven by greed and hubris rather than honor and humility.

Altman's American frontier is a land of selfish opportunists rather than noble nation-builders. Women are dependent, one way or another, on their bodies for survival. There are elements of decency and sentiment that filter through the cracks of this grey facade: whores with dreams of legitimacy, a cowboy defending the honor of his wife, and more. Still, in this world, the reward for decency more often than not is death.

Although slow moving, the movie is quite watchable. Given the absence of conventions to guide the viewer, there is actual suspense as to where the story is going. The unvarnished and frank presentations of sex, vulgarity, and violence produce genuine emotional responses. They are integral to the themes of the film and thus have no air of gratuity or sensationalism.

The set-up (romantic foibles among rich, sophisticated, well-educated New Yorkers) is reminiscent of a typical Woody Allen film, but this treatment lacks the quirkiness of Woody's best. Woody also never made "issue" or zeitgeist comedies and this film is all about the big issue of older men who date younger women, leaving exciting and vital older women to wither and dry up.

The characters and dialogue here are much more straightforward and mainstream, which certainly was a factor in this movie's box-office success. There are several sequences of full-out raucous fun, balanced by the expected verbal sparring between Nicholson and Keaton.

Jack and Diane (maybe someone should write a little ditty about this pair!) are well-matched. It's so easy to take Jack for granted these days: long ago so many of his performances lapsed into self-parody. Yet all of that baggage is exactly why he simply HAD to play this character. But even if he's doing his standard schtick, he's still "Jack," and he more than holds his own, as usual.

With all of the florid acclaim for Diane's performance, you expect to be disappointed in some way. I was not. This really is a career high point for someone with some great comic credentials. It starts with being is one of those rare actors who simply cannot deliver a line without complete honesty. It continues with the realization that the whole time, she's adding so much that just couldn't have been on the written page of the script.