The Heart of American Darkness

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Robert Altman's Short Cuts -- one of the season's most widely anticipated films -- opens with shots of helicopters, photographed so they look like giant bugs as they roar across the night skies, doing battle with a little bug, the Medfly, terror of the California fruit industry. This periodic chemical warfare, in which insecticides are noisily laid down across entire neighborhoods, is one of the minor, faintly comic annoyances of Los Angeles life. All that technology; such a humble and primitive foe.

The film ends with an earthquake rumbling across L.A. Such periodic seismic uproars are, of course, something more than an annoyance. There's nothing funny about them and no technology to fight them. They are nature's blunt reminder that life in L.A. is transitory, that the very ground under one's ! feet is not to be trusted.

The temblor shakes the lives of everyone still alive at the conclusion of the movie. But not more so than the events they have endured prior to it. Among the characters: the grieving parents of a little boy who dies mysteriously after a hit-and-run accident from which he calmly walked away; a group of fishermen who steadfastly pursue their sport despite a dead body floating in their favorite fishing hole; a woman who runs a telephone sex service while tending her children and sexually ignoring her husband (ultimately with terrible results); a wide variety of men and women who are cheating or have cheated on their spouses. These people mostly have bad jobs or no jobs. Some drink too much. Some are lonely. Some are depressed or angry. But all are "normal" in the faces they present to the world.

Everything about Short Cuts, which runs 3 hr. 9 min., recounts no less than eight stories and deploys 24 major actors, signals large aspiration and a desire to present a panoramic vision of life in what everyone is now pleased to think of as the heart of American darkness. Los Angeles, the city that has in a wink of history's eye ceased to be Everyman's Great Utopia, has become instead everyone's Great Dystopia.

Whether the film, which has the prestigious opening-night slot at the New York Film Festival this Friday, achieves its highest aims is likely to prove hotly debatable as it rolls slowly into theaters during the fall. L.A. is, after all, the world's easiest satirical target. Moreover, Altman and co- screenwriter Frank Barhydt are adapting -- freely commingling is a better description -- short stories by the late Raymond Carver. These have quite a different bleakness about them and are, anyway, resistant to the implicit cultural generalizations the movie tries to impose on them. Carver was content to capture discrete moments of confusion and loss in everyday, mostly lower- middle-class lives, rendered in spare, sparsely populated stories. His manner rigorously excluded direct emotional comment on the behavior of his people. Or, for that matter, ironic observations about it.

Altman, in contrast, is an exuberant inclusionist. His best and most characteristic films (MASH, Nashville, The Player) teem with characters bouncing from one level to another of multilayered stories that are full of chance encounters and crazy coincidences. "There's something about this mural-type film that interests me," he says simply. It was -- what else? -- chance that brought Altman to Carver. He asked his secretary for reading matter for a transatlantic flight, and she provided several collections of Carver's stories. Dipping in and out of them as he dropped in and out of sleep, Altman found that by the end of the flight they had all homogenized. "I really couldn't remember one from the other," he says. But he did realize, "My God, this is a movie." Specifically, an Altman movie.

Maybe Altman gives Carver's people more interesting or eccentric jobs than they originally had; maybe he condescends to them occasionally; maybe one story that is his own and Barhydt's invention is melodramatically overweening. Nevertheless, this movie works. In part, that's because Altman and Carver do share one important characteristic: short attention spans. They like to touch a moment and move quickly on. True to his title, Altman does not linger on any of his stories. Nobody is ever on long enough to grow tedious, and his linkages between stories (the screenwriters used color-coded file cards pinned to a bulletin board to keep them straight) are wonderfully inventive and set up very curious resonances. "I kind of wish it were shorter," says Altman, "but this is what it is. It's like having a kid who's seven feet tall. What do you do? You buy him a new bed and hope he can play basketball."

If Altman's impatience with conventional narrative animates his film, so does his patience with and trust of actors. He's always been a man who encourages his performers to riff on a script's themes, and they respond with astonishing brio. "This movie was like a symphony, with Bob serving as the conductor," says one of his featured players, Matthew Modine. "It created a tremendous amount of pressure because you have to understand where you're at, when you come in, and what your role is. It's like a musician standing in front of these two big timpani drums. All he may have to do is hit them two times, but there's a tremendous potential for missing his cue and throwing everything off." Says Altman: "These parts aren't found in everyday movies. Here, suddenly, the actors can really create a character and play the moment, without worrying that they have to murder someone in the third act."

It may be unfair to single anyone out of this extraordinary cast, but the lunatic self-assurance of Tim Robbins as a motorcycle cop stealing his own children's dog (he hates the mutt), conducting an affair and covering his absences with tall tales of undercover drug investigations is hatefully hilarious. His braying boldness represents one emotional extreme in the picture. The other (the one that touches the most lives, and whose story is structurally the center of the film) is played, with great delicacy, by Andie MacDowell and Bruce Davison as the couple trying to cope with their child's hit-and-run accident.

Between these poles, Jack Lemmon contributes a self-justifying monologue about a long-ago but devastating marital infidelity that is haunting in its self-delusions. Jennifer Jason Leigh as the mom with a sideline in dirty talk and Anne Archer as a woman whose part-time job is clowning for school kids superbly represent lower-middle-class economic desperation. And then there's Julianne Moore, whose doctor-husband (Modine) obsessively pesters her about a one-night stand she may or may not have had years ago. When she finally makes her long confession, she is half-naked -- a brave actor's choice, signaling not eroticism but vulnerability.

That quality is Short Cuts' great redeeming grace. But it is Altman's refusal to linger on it sentimentally, his joyous appreciation of his actors' wicked inventiveness, and everyone's passionate, quick-witted desire to expose the vagaries of human behavior under quotidian pressure that simply sweep you up and sweep away whatever doubts you may have about its grand design. It is, finally, as a richly pulsating, hugely entertaining human comedy -- antic, wayward, glancing -- that Short Cuts bemuses, amuses and finally entrances us.

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles