230 3 Women

[knives]

Does anybody like Dr. T and the Women?

IMDB says at least 300 do.

[Forrest Taft]

Does anybody like Dr. T and the Women?

I do. Beyond Therapy on the other hand...

[Brian C]

OK, better question: is anyone willing to defend Dr. T and the Women? (Or Prêt-à-Porter?)

[JMULL222]

I'm as big an Altman fan as any, but even I will be shocked to find someone defending "O.C. and Stiggs".

[domino harvey]

Or that National Lampoon movie?

Edit: shit, I hate when I miss a page of discussion and there's no X button

[colinr0380]

Ah, well, we can't all like the same things.
I love Robert Altman, but this film just fell apart after the first half hour.
I saw it twice in the late seventies, but haven't wanted to see it since.
I might get this and have another look.

That reads like a rather unorthodox haiku! I love 3 Women (for me the supreme moment is that lengthy dream sequence/hallucination near the end in which the entire film up to that point gets restructured and recontextualised, with Janice Rule's gaze back into the camera the moment around which the sequence pivots) but it is a stream of consciousness film which feels as if it works best when submitted to rather than dissected (even if I did a bit of that in the post above!)

Sadly I've never seen O.C. & Stiggs (wasn't Altman trying to do an obnoxious teen comedy with unlikeable main characters there? i.e. every modern Hollywood film for decades afterwards) or Beyond Therapy. Or Quintet, which is the Altman I most want to see now - and if I learn the rules it might be fun to play the spin off game too!

And I liked Dr T & The Women, which felt like a nice capper to Altman's Southern period and makes a nice "Southern women" companion piece with Cookie's Fortune - who could forget (no matter how hard they may try) the pitiful sight of Farrah Fawcett frolicking naked in a shopping mall's fountain! And I suppose it also has a distinction as the only other film featuring a gynaecologist as the main character other than Dead Ringers! (Interesting that it also goes to the other extreme from the Cronenberg socially crippled doctor to the similarly obvious stereotype of a smarmy 'love them and leave them' cocksman who loves every woman in the abstract but is afraid of one-to-one commitment)

I can see how the ending of Dr T,

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(i.e. the deux ex machina hurricane followed by redemptive 'missionary work')

is incredibly annoying from the perspective of engagement with the 'realistic' story up to that point, but on reflection it feels psychologically appropriate and quite a neat way of keeping a shallow character from having to confront themselves except for on the most superficial level.

(Or Prêt-à-Porter?)

Sadly this is quite indefensible, except perhaps as a nightmarish dark-side version of The Player or Short Cuts without the wit of Raymond Carver to make us feel for the characters.

The 'Emperor's new clothes' take on the fashion world might have led to a few jokes but was just too obvious a target for barbed satire to be of much effect (sadly similar to How To Get Ahead In Advertising, which Richard E. Grant was also involved in), with little of interest done with the setting. And of course the running gag of various characters stepping in dog crap is often held up as an example of just how little wit there was in the film, and for the causal way it demeans its characters. But then most of the characters if not pompously overblown are having shrill, pointless arguments with each other (I suppose it is one accomplishment to have made the scenes between Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts so unappealing and tiresome!), or are just utterly vapid and dumb (poor Kim Basinger, even if she does get the best, if totally inappropriate for the character, final line of the film!)

[tavernier]

OK, better question: is anyone willing to defend Dr. T and the Women? (Or Prêt-à-Porter?)

Here's Armond, the ultimate Altman fan/apologist, mentioning Pret-a-Porter in his review of last year's Boogie Woogie:

Centered around attempts to buy Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie” from a dying owner (Christopher Lee exclaiming: “I got it from the master himself!”), the movie attempts the examination of a scene like Robert Altman achieved in Pret-a-Porter. But whereas Altman transcended cynicism, Boogie Woogie lacks all of Mondrian’s beauty.

And here's Armond on Dr. T.

[Forrest Taft]

And I liked Dr T & The Women, which felt like a nice capper to Altman's Southern period and makes a nice "Southern women" companion piece with Cookie's Fortune - who could forget (no matter how hard they may try) the pitiful sight of Farrah Fawcett frolicking naked in a shopping mall's fountain! And I suppose it also has a distinction as the only other film featuring a gynaecologist as the main character other than Dead Ringers! (Interesting that it also goes to the other extreme from the Cronenberg socially crippled doctor to the similarly obvious stereotype of a smarmy 'love them and leave them' cocksman who loves every woman in the abstract but is afraid of one-to-one commitment)

I can see how the ending of Dr T,

SpoilerShow

(i.e. the deux ex machina hurricane followed by redemptive 'missionary work')

is incredibly annoying from the perspective of engagement with the 'realistic' story up to that point, but on reflection it feels psychologically appropriate and quite a neat way of keeping a shallow character from having to confront themselves except for on the most superficial level.

Pretty much agree with you on Dr T. I liked it, it was fun, but hardly a major work. I do prefer Cookies Fortune to Dr T though, and if you like these two I'd also recommend "All the President's Women", Altman's episode from the TV-series Gun, written by Anne Rapp, who also wrote Dr T and Cookie.

[matrixschmatrix]

Great AVClub article about Altman put up today, covering pretty much his whole career (including, to get this back vaguely on topic, 3 Women!) The writer seems to feel pretty much the same way about Dr. T, that it's inconsequential but fun.

[Tom Hagen]

I finally saw this last night. In this spirit of the film, here are some completely random thoughts: The '70s, man. Stunning art decoration, and perhaps even better cinematography. Post-accident sexpot Sissy could have given prime-of-her-career (and then contemporary) Farrah a run for her money; the effect of her sexuality in those scenes was really jarring, especially since she was in full-on Badlands/Carrie troubled innocent mode for the rest of the picture. That goddamn flute, over and over! Far less of a Bergman homage/rip than I was lead to believe. I don't inherently have a problem with dream logic and psychological totems, but the way that it was used in this film didn't strike me as particularly enrapturing (see Kieślowski), profound (see Bergman), or frightening (see Lynch). I'm not sure that I was ultimately invested in the narrative enough to be puzzled or unsettled in any significant way by the ending. I didn't expect there to be as much humor as there was. I've never seen anything so purple in all of my life -- seriously that apartment alone justifies the forthcoming Blu-ray.

[Roger Ryan]

...I don't inherently have a problem with dream logic and psychological totems, but the way that it was used in this film didn't strike me as particularly enrapturing (see Kieślowski), profound (see Bergman), or frightening (see Lynch)...

You're right, but I wasn't expecting "dream logic" or "psychological totems" from this film given that Altman steers most of it in the same direction as his other work. The humorous character development and unremarkable locations did not prepare me for the darker surrealistic turns the film takes, so I found those turns intriguing even in their blandness. Only afterward did I recognize the twin imagery placed throughout the film simply because I didn't expect the film to go in the direction it did...

...And isn't that one of the wonderful things about this period of film-making? It's so difficult to watch movies these days without already knowing exactly what the tone is going to be or suspect how the director is going to try to manipulate you.
Watching the 3 WOMEN trailer after viewing the film, I was astounded that it barely seemed to sell the film at all; it's so oblique as to be practically useless as a marketing tool. However, it appealed to the part of me that does not want to know anything about a film before seeing it.

[o z o n e]

Beaver

[aox]

This is screening one night only at Nitehawk in NYC in late February.

Nitehawk presents a special one night screening with Abrams Books of Robert Altman’s 3 WOMEN in celebration of the new book Altman.

Book signing with authors Kathryn Reed Altman and Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan in Nitehawk’s Lo-Fi Bar from 8-9pm. Copies of Altman will be available for sale. Altman and Vallan will also introduce the film!

3 Women is one of Robert Altman’s most beautiful-looking and personal films. It is the story of three women: Millie (Shelley Duvall) and Pinky (Sissy Spacek) are attendants at the Desert Hot Springs spa, where they help older patients in and out of mineral baths. The first is self-absorbed and self-assured to the point of delusion. The second, meek and inexperienced, appears smitten by her friend’s poise. Willie (Janice Rule) paints eerie creates on the bottom of the pool and is pregnant. The main male character of the film is her husband, Edgar (Robert Fortier). According to Altman, amid this strange triangle of shifting female identities, the macho, boozing, womanizing Edgar is sort of a “last man on earth.” – excerpt from Altman.
- See more at: http://www.nitehawkcinema.com/movie/3-w ... piFw8.dpuf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

No word on what the special menu will be that night.

[George Kaplan]

No word on what the special menu will be that night.

Pigs in a Blanket and Chocolate Puddin' Tarts I should hope.

[AnamorphicWidescreen]

3 women may be my favorite Altman movie. Excellent performances by Shelley Duvall & Sissy Spacek. Some comments/observations:

-Purple seemed to have some significance in the film - i.e., the artwork/drawings done by the pregnant artist (as seen in the bottom of the swimming pool), the Purple Sage Apartments, the clothes, etc.

-You get a real feeling of desolation/hopelessness in this movie, i.e. the stark desert, etc.

-The cute blonde twins who worked at the senior rehabilitation facility were quite creepy, in a horror-movie kind of way...

-I thought it was hilarious how Millie (Duvall) kept trying to get others (mainly guys) to pay attention to her and they just ignored her; that being said, one of the funniest recurring sequences is when she kept trying to get that guy's attention (in the apartment complex) & whenever she spoke to him, he coughed as if he were sick - presumably to avoid talking to her - LOL.

-I also thought Millie's obsession with food & the time it took to cook certain dishes amusing & also pathetic.....

-The elderly couple who came to see the Pinky character in the hospital & claimed to be her parents seemed unlikely - Pinky said she didn't know who they were, but that may just have been a result of her fall.

My interpretation of the film's ending is that

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the whole movie was a dream, up until the very end; i.e., when you see the Pinky & Millie characters in the Desert bar (and they're revealed to be mother & daughter), and then you see the pregnant artist (as the grandmother?!) sitting on the porch, that's the reality. The grandmother mentions she just had a strange dream, and I believer all of the preceding story was the dream she just had. Just my .02 - didn't listen to the commentary & haven't read any real reviews of the film, so am not sure if this opinion is widely held or not....

[mfunk9786]

Shelley Duvall discussion moved here

[Rayon Vert]

-Purple seemed to have some significance in the film - i.e., the artwork/drawings done by the pregnant artist (as seen in the bottom of the swimming pool), the Purple Sage Apartments, the clothes, etc.

I don't know what the significance of the colors are, but this film definitely pays a lot of attention to them: I count four that the film really uses as its palette: yellow (primarily connected to the Shelley Duvall character), light-to-mid-range blue, purple and pink. Every scene conveys them in some fashion - the clothes, the drawings, the building interiors and exteriors, vehicles. Every time I watch the film I'm just fascinated by this aspect. Kind of a soft desert palette that fits the location of the film, and that softness contrasts with the darkness of the themes.

[terabin]

My first impression of the ending was similar to Anamorphic's:

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The grandmother, Willie, had had the weirdest dream in which her daughter and granddaughter were different people, shifting in personality and power in relationship to one another after an accident. In her dream, Willie played the role of the observer, unable to affect the world around her except to provide background paintings to twisting drama.

Incredible film. Equal parts funny ('Keep it out of the pool it'll be alright'), dreamy (the moving water filtered over shots of Willie's mythic paintings), and unsettling (the shifting relationshio between Millie and Pinky). I even thought at various points

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Is Millie Pinky and Pinky Millie? Or are Millie and Pinky two personalities at war within Willie's tortured mind? Are these characters playing out a storied version of Willie's paintings?

Maybe more than anything, I enjoyed that the film kept me on my toes. I had no idea what was going to happen next and was sad when it ended.

[therewillbeblus]

Really interesting thoughts combing through this thread (colin's post on the previous page is particularly observant and insightful), and while I can understand the frustration some hold toward the ending, it works for me in the same way Assassination Nation transitions from a hypervigilant fixation on real, raw experience (even if dressed up in an aesthetic of surreal overstimulation to emphasize the relentless sensory overload coating the existence of today's youth) into an allegorical eruption of genre violence. That film's second half is a response to the intolerability of compounded isolation, coercive expectations to fit a role, and infinite externally-imposed aggression when inevitably failing to meet the standards for expectations of that role (considering, in today's society, everyone judging has different expectations - impossible for anyone to meet one of those fantasies let alone multiple, at once, impatiently on the judgers' time).

3 Women is also about roles, but I think its surrealism-in-reality succeeds, throughout and following the shift halfway through, because each character benefits from fulfilling a role and having a responsibility in filling it. It's a lot like how (as fucked-up as it sounds to say) a 'part' of the recipient of the abuse in an abusive relationship is receiving some benefit from staying in it, whether a kind of comfort or security in maintaining what 'is', even if the overall relationship is objectively harmful. The 'logically' safe choice might be to leave, but a younger, immature emotional part clasps onto the leg of that relationship because it feels safer to stay. I think Millie operates as the dominant force in the first act because she's rebounding from a deficit felt by whatever her role was in the previous roommate dynamic, or emulating the role she was observing as an 'ideal' - a 'maybe this will solve my problems' desperate delusion most of us have experienced. We get enough information to know that she was the one sleeping on the cot, and we see her cater to her prior roommate who shows up in a scene only to discard Millie as insignificant - so it's pretty clear she was the submissive one there. Millie's "self" doesn't necessarily covet that dominant position, but a part of her does, just as a part of Pinky wants to look up to someone, and just like a part of Millie wants to comfort and protect, like a mother, or answer to and be provided a framework to exist in, like a daughter. Pinky also wants to be a dominant force, or part of her does (she also gravitates back towards Millie's motherly figure in a blended role of her two shown 'selves' in the last act) - but that's the tragedy that lies beneath all this role-playing and shifting: It's all honest, and yet no role provides a permanent catharsis to locate tangible, self-actualized identity that each character seeks when trying on the part.

It makes sense that, after all this shifting around in such a short time span, the characters would be left in a kind of indefinable space, adrift. If I decided to go away and isolate in the mountains for a few months, I'd blend with my cognitive part and probably go a bit crazy, or at best I'd start seeing myself a certain way based on limited resources to advance or expand that definition of self. These women already have very few resources they can rely upon. Certainly not men, institutions, or most of their peers... they only really attempt genuine depth in intimacy with one another (or, perhaps, only get the opportunity to really develop that intimacy, since everyone else rejects them close to the beginning stage). But even then, there's a competitive spirit that comes out, an impulse to play a role in friction with one another.

There's a nice ambiguity here: I don't necessarily think this caustic pattern emerges or progresses because they're destined to experience dysphoria due to relentless social comparison in the presence of a homogenous demographic a la Sartre's No Exit, though that's certainly one tragic reading. Another is that they wind up in a kind of Sisyphean catatonia, their identities withering as they try on new roles repeatedly, with no comfortable clothes fitting to cultivate a vital foundation to ground them while they experience all of life's ceaseless traumas. But there's also the reading that - much like children engage in these games of dominance and submission in play - these women are only comfortable around one another, and so this is the 'safe' way/place to do what they need to do: try out different roles, and form identities -even if impermanent is the best they can do- in response to the people they trust to do so against.

Though this is somewhat tragic too - if these are the safest vehicles to engage with, and we're destined to wind up in a myopic state, isolated in our own mind with a single concrete part of our complex selves we cannot access (Willie's inability to remember her dream, the rote and monotonous directions of preparing food), what does that say about the veracity of our hope? Maybe, similar to the above example and Assassination Nation's own fantastical narrative left-turn, the logical 'safe' option is drowned out by that emotional safety to self-preserve against an overwhelming assault of unwelcoming stimuli - at least for these three women, who have a sensitivity familiar to the viewer but seemingly alien to everyone else who can properly 'function' in the world of the film. I get the comparisons to Mulholland Dr. upthread - even if those posts were differentiating rather than accommodating both real and surreal ideas to exist in the same film - because this is some kind of nightmare, rooted in the reflection of our own lonely realities as we're trapped in a social stratosphere that's inescapable, magnetic, and perpetually alienating. This also makes it a great 70s film, though I've recorded enough thoughts elsewhere on the decade's persistent and fatalistic identity-diffusion following the popped Hope-Balloon of the 60s to get back into that here.

[Rayon Vert]

Good stuff. My favorite Altman, despite the stiff competition, and clear winner for 1977. Your post made me reach out for Kolker's take in A Cinema of Loneliness. He riffs on the absent personalities and selves and exchange of identities (Persona was a precedent here, but he also mentions Images). I absolutely love the dreamy quality of the whole film and of the cinematography in particular, which kind of expresses the dreamy weightlessness of those drifting personalities, like tumbleweeds in the desert!

Interesting ideology-analyzing criticism (well founded here I'd say) take he has on the domination theme, linking it to Willie's murals of the "reptilian women" and the "monstrous male who controls them." (p. 391).

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The film concludes with Altman's most bitter observation of domination and passivity, of assent to ritual and assumption of cultural myths. The three women, ridding themselves of men (Willie's child was male and is born dead; and the suggestion is clear that the women shot Edgar (...)), proceed to reenact a family structure with one dominant member, now maternal rather than paternal, and two passive members. The enclave they form in the garbage-strewn desert is a parody of the male-dominated society reflected in Willie's mural and whose patterns of domination and passivity Altman sees spread through all relationships. They can only exist in an isolated reenactment of power and passivity with the structure of the family, that central image of psychological and economic control, the place where the ideology is delivered, nurtured, and reproduced.
Robert Kolker (2000), A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman. Third Edition. Oxford University Press, p. 394-395.

[therewillbeblus]

That's a good one, and of course (per usual) I'm taking about the Internal Family Systems model of psychology that I practice and have ingrained as a worldview. So while certainly referencing actual social structures and responses to them, in a sense it's also an externalization of the internal family system that constructs our psyches and our conflicted relationships to stimuli.

[oh yeah]

This is my favorite Altman as well, although Nashville and Short Cuts aren't far behind. But there's just something so uniquely, purely dreamlike and haunting about this one that has stayed with me very closely since I first saw it. All the yellow and purple and water/birth imagery and those demonic-looking reptilian paintings... It just sticks in the mind, and as a whole the film really feels to me more "like a dream" than any other I've seen. It's not just the aforementioned surreal imagery but also the shifting identities and very emotional, primal feelings evoked in the fights between Millie and Pinkie. As a viewer, one is like the dreamer, within which resides multitudes - both the impetuous childishness of Pinkie and the more adult but inwardly sad and broken Millie. Not to mention Edgar who serves as the film's lone Father figure, and a pathetic one at that. But there's the feeling that all these characters truly are part of the same consciousness, and the film evokes that strange feeling one gets upon waking from a dream which seemed so emotionally intense and so lengthy but which was about people you've never even met before. 3 Women has that feeling down pat, especially in its incredibly unsettlingly abrupt ending, the music coming in frantic and urgent like the beep of an alarm clock.

[therewillbeblus]

While there's a dreamlike (and certainly haunting) vibe here, I find myself diagnosing this as one of Altman's more "realistic" portraits of human behavior and familiar social structures and settings, perhaps second only to California Split (and there's really only a handful of his works that can fit that bill). Most of the film plays out exactly how I'd expect dynamics to in real life if granted a superpower to be a fly on the wall. There are also pronounced shifts that escalate their progression according to an alien temporal trajectory, but unlike the dissenting voices in this thread who are critical of where this ends up, I think the coexistence of shades of surreality within the reality only helps to enrich the situational realism. Objective realism is eventually eviscerated as it no longer matters, and is replaced with the vulnerable realism of the psyche. The ambiguity of what that means works no matter the interpretation (and there are countless interesting ones found here and elsewhere) but like the musical dance at the end of Euphoria season one, or the Euro-grindhouse excesses of violence in Assassination Nation, the dreaminess a resilient vehicle to cope with the unbearable nature of reality, and I see the film far closer to stark realism than a dream.

[Rayon Vert]

I think some of my favorite films have that dreamlike, meditative quality - definitely this one very strongly (even more so than Bergman's Persona), several Antonionis or parts of them, Powell's Age of Consent to a certain degree (the commentary by Kent Jones if I remember helps articulate that) - they all have the sense of a floating lightness. I'm definitely drawn to that. And I think I agree 3 Women probably does that consistent dream atmosphere (while still being very much anchored in reality like twbb says) more than any other film that comes to mind.

[therewillbeblus]

It's funny, my top film of '77, L’Apprenti Salaud, is a fantastical zany farce but when it eventually slows down, reveals itself to be a dream birthed by a man so averse to dysphoria that he just needs to keep moving and existing in the dream. I don't think other Deville fans have ever shared this theory (which I've relayed more thoroughly in the spoilerbox of some other Deville writeup in his dedicated thread) but it's part of why I love that film so much - a kind-of reversed application of what you're describing here! Though I think Pierrot le fou operates similarly - a cinematic carnival of genres and tones to distract the overthinker from the inability to engage with emotions.