Adrift in a Winter Wonderland

By Frank Rich

QUINTET Directed by Robert Altman Screenplay by Frank Barhydt, Robert Altman and Patricia Resnick

At first Robert Altman's new film looks like a baffling slice of metaphysical sci-fi--a sort of 2001 at Marienbad. Weirdly costumed characters with names like Essex and Ambrosia wander around a frozen, nameless city mumbling about the Apocalypse. Packs of vicious dogs appear in scene after snowy scene to gnaw on abandoned human corpses. The number five turns up everywhere: people wear five-sided hats, speak of a five-sided universe and play a five-sided board game called Quintet. What is going on? Is that rascal Altman trying to bring back the new math?

About halfway through the movie, one begins to wish he were. The point of Quintet, it becomes painfully clear, is not nearly so obscure or weighty or downbeat as the director would have us believe. Altman is coming out foursquare in favor of life over death, love over hate, free will over fate. Though such optimistic feelings are admirable, there is no legitimate reason to cloak them in the arty mannerisms of yesteryear's avantgarde. Quintet has more highfalutin dialogue, pregnant pauses and overbearing symbols than the collected works of Maxwell Anderson; it has roughly as much content as a routine fortune cookie.

The film's story, once it can be deciphered, is even more tired than its ideas. Quintet is built around a vintage sci-fi gambit that only a few years ago turned up in an execrable action movie, Roller ball. Here again, we are in the midst of a futuristic society that worships a deadly game with indecipherable rules. Quintet appears to be a shotgun marriage between backgammon and Russian roulette. The hero (Paul Newman instead of James Caan) is trying to beat the game before he becomes its bloodied victim. Yet the plot is so familiar that the audience figures out the moves at least an hour before the characters do. By the time the inevitable climax finally arrives, most moviegoers may wish they had stayed at home to watch a truly exciting sport--like, say, The $20,000 Pyramid.

Quintet's tedium is in no way relieved by Altman's film-making technique. In place of his usual brio, the director has used pretentious cinematic gimmicks, monochromatic sets and portentous, dissonant music. He reduces an all-star international cast--Newman, Fernando Rey, Bibi Andersson, Brigitte Fossey, David Langton, Vittorio Gassman--to interchangeable (and often indistinguishable) ciphers. He blurs the perimeters of his images with Vaseline. Though two writers assisted Altman on the screenplay, the witless lines amount to paint-by-number existentialism: "Every time you cheat death, you feel the pure thrill of life."

Quintet's grave tone notwithstanding, the dialogue is often so uplifting and epigram matic that it could almost be set to a Rich ard Rodgers score.

None of this would be so upsetting were Altman not one of the few great di rectors in modern American film. Quin tet seems a sad rejection of all the artistic instincts that have fueled his best movies. In the past Altman has let art flow from life: he has allowed his characters to operate spontaneously and then permitted his films' meanings to grow out of the crazy-quilt action. This time around he has done the reverse. The characters are constricted by a trite, preconceived moral and soon become inanimate pawns in a pseudointellectual shell game. Quin tet is designed to stimulate superficial cocktail party chatter rather than to provoke an audience's hearts or minds. Altman has toyed with this method once before, in the disastrous denouement of the otherwise vivid 3 Women, but he has never let such pedantry overwhelm an entire movie. The results seem not only silly but insincere. For all the soppy lip service Altman pays to life, his film never attempts to arise from the slumber of the dead .

-- Frank Rich

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