Who is Julie Christie

Doctor Zhivago
(Two-Disc Special Edition)

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

McCabe and Mrs. Miller is yet another brillant work from Robert Altman who along with Scorsese ranks as one of the two greatest filmmakers America has produced. Next to "Nashville", this is Altman's best film. One of Altman's devices is to take an established genre of filmmaking and turn it completely inside out and reexamine it.

Here, Altman has made a Western (or is is an Anti-Western) like no other. Warren Beatty gives the performance of his career here (you would'nt know he and Altman were at odds the entire shoot), and remember the lovely Julie Christie as Mrs. Miller, the tough talking shrewd and business smart prostitute.

Altman's sensational style of filmmaking perfectly suits the material. His remarkable use of overlapping dialogue demands multiple viewings and Vilmos Zsigmond's incredible, ususual cinematography is endlessly fascinating to look at. And, as with most of Altman's work, one can interpet the film a number of ways. Is it a tough look at achieving the American Dream, or is it a study of American frontierism/individualism vs. community/democracy? Is it an indictment of Capitalism and a look at the way Big Business encroached on the frontier and a simple way of life. Is it a study of loneliness and heroism? The answer is yes to all of these.

To top it off, Altman's use of Leonard Cohen's songs to accompany the film adds to the overall sense of melancholy, it fits it beautifully.

Shampoo

Shampoo is probably the most sophisticated sex comedy ever made in the USA. It's a very clear (and very funny) look at how love and lust get inextricably mixed up with up with power, money, position, and politics.

George (Warren Beatty), the philandering Beverly Hills hairdresser, is the primary victim of the rules of the game, late-60s Southern California-style. Unlike the protagonist of the great Renoir movie, George doesn't end up dead, but he's left alone, abandoned by all the women he's bedded, looking like a naive fool. And that's George's sin--he's an uncynical romantic in a world that doesn't know the difference between felt emotion and deliberate calculation. He sleeps with women because he genuinely likes them. For him, taking a woman to bed is an extension of doing her hair--it's an intimate act in which he makes her look and feel better.

All the other characters in the movie use sex as part of a larger plan--they each have some separate goal on their mind, which they achieve in one way or another, and George is left behind with his silly emotional and sexual vulnerabiliy. He's Don Giovanni in reverse--the boy who can't say no because he actually gives a damn--and he pays a steep price for his availability.

Playing a slightly out of it dupe, Beatty has never been better or more dazzlingly glamorous. And he's surrounded by a flawless ensemble cast--Lee Grant is simply astonishing as a deceived and deceiving Beverly Hills matron, and Julie Christie, in her flared pants and mini skirts, is peerlessy sexy as the 1968 version of a Rodeo Drive courtesan.

Thanks to Robert Towne, "Shampoo" also has some of the most natural, unforced, yet revealing dialogue ever heard in an American movie--nothing is stylized or italicized, but every nonchalant remark hits target like a polished Wilde epigram. Delectable.

Away from Her

Based on a short story by Alice Munro, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," Away from Her, directed by Sarah Polley, will break your heart.

Fiona, in her early 60's develops Alzheimer's and makes the decision, when the time comes, that she will enter a nursing home. The plot is straight forward and all too familiar to those of us who have dealt with this insidious, unforgiving disease. When Fiona enters the nursing facility, she becomes more distant to her husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and develops a crush on another patient Aubrey, who is married to Marian (Olympia Dukasis). Fiona becomes every person with Alzheimer's: the putting of the skillet in the refrigerator, the covering up of memory loss, ("I'm not adept at names") remembering things in the distant past, (on the way to the nursing home, Fiona reminds Grant of his affairs with women students twenty years previously) the remembering of things one minute and forgetting them the next, the gradual deteriorating of both mind and body.

Both Pinsent and Dukasis give fine performances. (She as Marian has her own problems which are mostly financial. She cannot leave Aubrey in the home or she will lose their house, their only asset.) But Christie is magnificent as Fiona-- and looks the way a woman who was otherworldly beautiful at 20 would look at 66, still beautiful in old age. Much of the action is set in snowy Canadian winters and there are shots of Christie that remind us of Laura in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO.

For all its bleakness-- and there is plenty of that, particularly the scenes in the nursing home where some patients just sit, others shout, and the female staff with their forced cheerfulness, many of whom wear those awful flowered tops and ugly pastel pants-- the movie is also about the power of love and staying together for the duration. There is a beautiful passage when Fiona reminds Grant that he had nothing to hold him to her in the marriage, that he could have left but he didn't. She loves him for that and thanks him.