A Perfect Couple

I finally got around to seeing this for-many-years-as-good-as-lost Altman film, and I must say, I was extremely impressed. It is a highly unusual piece. Altman biographer Patrick McGilligan says "There is not another movie like it in the Altman canon," and he's not kidding; there is scarcely another movie like it in anyone's canon. The closest I can think of is George Romero's also criminally underrated There's Always Vanilla, which also deals with the arc of a romance between "ordinary" people with no touch of Hollywood iconography about them.

The film is conceived in terms of a number of binaries: two families, a rigidly patriarchal Greek family and a rock music collective with its own sort-of-patriarch; classical music and pop music, which join hands in the climax; a "perfect couple" of two decidedly imperfect, non-glamorous people, and a near-silent "imperfect couple" of two glamor-pusses, whose path repeatedly crosses that of the perfect couple, but in ways that only the audience perceives. (The perfect couple meets through a video dating service that is a direct precursor to the Internet dating services of our own day; that lends the film an oddly timely-contemporary touch.)

The rock music collective, Keeping 'Em Off the Streets, co-formed by Altman collaborator Allan Nicholls, actually existed and concertized a couple of times, but failed to win a recording contract. (The soundtrack was preserved on Altman's own Lion's Gate label; I recently scored a copy of this rare LP.) As many of the reviewers here at the IMDb enthuse, the music is quite delightful, and rather difficult to pigeonhole, with rock, pop, jazz, and theater music elements. There are a lot of musicians, a lot of singers, a lot of people (and even a dog) just hanging around, in somewhat elaborate and rather magical spaces (courtesy of master designer Leon Ericksen), and the musical numbers seem to emerge from the ambiance. The film is very driven by the songs.

Adding to the flavor of A Perfect Couple is a remarkably casual-positive attitude toward several gay and lesbian characters, so much so that Vito Russo singled the film out in his book The Celluloid Closet as being "special" for its era in its recognition of a "happy, well-adjusted" lesbian couple as a "family."

In the lead roles, Paul Dooley is remarkably winning, and Marta Heflin has a mysterious, somewhat withdrawn quality that suddenly announces itself forcefully in her one solo number, "Won't Somebody Care", which is also one of the great musical sequences in all of movies, if you ask me -- right up there with Keith Carradine's "I'm Easy" in Nashville.

The next forgotten Altman film that needs to be rehabilitated is H.E.A.L.T.H., which Helene Keyssar praises most interestingly in her book Robert Altman's America. I saw it only once many years ago and am eager to see it again.

Possibly Altman's least well known theatrically released film, done in an era where he was making a lot of duds. Personally, I don't consider any Altman films duds – they're all interesting, at least. And this one is no exception. It's a quirky romantic comedy starring Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin. Dooley comes from a stuffy, old-fashioned Greek family steeped in classical music, and Heflin is a rock singer living in a hippie commune. The two meet through a video dating service, and the film depicts their rocky road to love. Altman's direction is very good, as usual, the script has a good palindromic structure, and I quite like the original songs. One big problem that I had is that Dooley comes on way too strong on that first date and the day afterward, almost creepy. Not a great film, but certainly a film that shouldn't be as forgotten as it is.

"Nashville" represented a critical and commercial high point for Altman. He followed it with a series of films that puzzled the critics and alienated his already slender audience (the critics loved his overlapping dialogue and generally unhappy endings but audiences didn't). "Buffalo Bill and the Indians", "A Wedding", and worst of all, "Quintet".

Altman was running out of studio backing and critical support. He had never really been a money maker and by 1979 with "Jaws" and "Star Wars" Hollywood had discovered the special effects summer blockbuster. It was tired of auteurs like him and Bogdanovich and Coppola, particularly auteurs who didn't make money (auteurs who remain the darlings of the critics like Woody Allen and Scorsese and don't cost too much money are OK.). Altman needed to show Hollywood that he could make money.

"A Perfect Couple" and "Popeye" were Altman's attempts to make movies he hoped would reach out to the general audience and be hits at the box office.

This decidedly unconventional romantic comedy is watchable, but is neither very romantic, nor very funny; more often it seems like a promo for a pop music band. One half of the "perfect couple", Marta Heflin, has some appeal, but Paul Dooley lacks charm, and their instant connection is not believable. The liveliest performance is given by Ann Ryerson as a horny possible date, but unfortunately her part is very small. Still, at least compared to the same year's "H.E.A.L.T.H", also by Robert Altman, which I saw yesterday, this one has a bit more structure to it. **1/2 out of 4.

Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin play a most decidedly IMperfect couple in Robert Altman's version of a romantic comedy. His claim at the time (justified) is that Hollywood had always allowed only beautiful people to fall in love, so he wanted to make a romance with a couple of ordinary folk. He succeeded when he found the paunchy Dooley and the distractingly skinny (nearly anorexic) Heflin for his leads, but the film itself is not much of a success. This came out during Altman's "experimental" period, meaning he threw together some disparate elements and hoped for the best. Actually, it's quite accessible for Altman, considering "Quintet" came out in the same year, and it's one of his least Altman-like projects. Unfortunately, it's those very qualities that also make it one of his least interesting and ugliest from a purely visual standpoint.

The film does boast some good if dated music though, performed by the real-life band Keepin' Em Off the Streets, led by Ted Neely, most known for playing the role of Jesus in the film version of "Jesus Christ Superstar" (and whom I saw perform the role on stage in a touring version).

Grade: C