The Long Goodbye
When we speak of languorous films, we tend to think of works suffused with velvety richness, of films that draw the audience through the screen’s flatness with a certain still vividity. The slowly unfurling narrative is enhanced, even superseded, by the carefully created and presented wealth of detail and design. In languor, the filmmaker engages the audience with an experience transcending mere plot by shifting the burden of story-telling from action and dialogue to the more purely sensual aspects of film. The deliberate film, conversely, presents a steely-strong narrative stretched taut through audiovisual space, allowing the filmmaker to foreground the nuances and deeper implications of the story being told against a relatively sparse frame. The languorous film pulls the viewer through the screen and invites a more experiential form of participation with the work, while the deliberate film intentionally distances the viewer from action-and-dialogue and asks for a more analytical participation. These, I think, are the two most common modes of filmmaking used to create successful works characterized by “slowness”.
Robert Altman creates films that are definitely, and I think deliberately, slow-moving but which are neither languorous nor deliberate but instead, well, Altmanesque. (Kubrick is another master of an idiosyncratic mode of masterful slowness, but he’s for another time and another film.) Altman’s genius, I think, stems from what his ongoing refutation of the notion that roles of person-as-individual and person-as-societal-unit are dichotimous; Altman’s characters are very much individualized human beings with their own sets of prejudices and quirks and very personal motivations, but at the same time they are consistently portrayed as being products of and actors within a larger social context. This is probably best exemplified in 3 Women, but that too is for another time. The most obvious example from today’s film is a bit of comic business that drives the first reel, wherein we see Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe going to great lengths (on a small, very human, scale) to satisfy his cat’s 3AM desire for Courry Brand cat food. In this extended comedy sketch we see a simultaneous snarky indictment of the commodification of something as basic and insignificant as ferchrissake’s cat food and a thumbed nose at the notion that market forces can override personal preferences and self-determination. It seems like a paradox, but it’s this very human (or, in this case, feline) tendency to be both A and not-A at the same time that seems to fascinate the director.
Of course, it’s also a great introduction to Marlowe as a straight-shooting 1950s hardoiled kind of guy thrust into highly commercialized, highly individualized 1973 Los Angeles. It foreshadows the major characters’ difficulties with interpersonal relationships, it lays the groundwork for some finely realized minor themes of societal privilege, and, of course, more than anything else it’s damned funny in a downbeat, minor key sort of way.
Look, it has to be said: Robert Altman is well known for his predilection for smoking pot, and I think that drug-of-choice greatly informs the director’s vision and suffuses his films. Like a person very stoned indeed, Altman hangs back from the action, observing all the goings-on from a mediated state. He is fascinated by details, but those details always hang around in the background, making themselves known but never dominating a scene. The pace of his films, neither languorous nor deliberate but something sui generis, also seems to be the cinematic realization of a well-baked perspective, with things happening in their own time and not hurried along by narrative demands. This lends an appearance of honesty and a heightened verisimilitude to Altman’s works, bringing a documentarian feel to the director’s unabashedly narrative films.
But this doesn’t tell you anything about The Long Goodbye in particular, does it?
The screenplay is adapted from Raymond Chandler’s novel by the legendary Leigh Brackett, and it retains the twisty noir-ness one would expect from such a work. That alone would be enough to make me happy, but Altman’s production of the work updates everyone but detective Marlowe into 1970s character-types, emphasizing the world-weariness and the essential inability to connect of the hardboiled gumshoe. In lesser hands that could seem a precious affectation, but with Altman’s engaged-but-distant style it works perfectly, almost subliminally.
Not much needs to be said about the story, as it hits most of the typical genre tropes. There’s a murder, a suicide, a valise of money stolen from a gangster, a drunken author and his glamorous-but-neglected wife. Henry Gibson gives a great turn as a shady doctor, there are some brilliantly tough police detectives, a Jewish gangster with a multi-cultural posse (including, in a non-speaking role, Arnold Schwarzenneger), a repeated melodic theme/song by John Williams and Johnny Mercer, and the whole thing hinges around a couple of trips to Mexico. What more could you want, plot-wise?
The production makes the most of the contrast between its post-War noir roots and its setting in then-contemporary Los Angeles, situating Marlowe in a crumbling Deco marvel and the other major players in a gated community of very-70s-indeed bungalows. This being Altman, of course, all the architecture along the way is keyed to the resident characters’ natures, as are the cars and the arrangements of the title song being played in their presence. Again, this would all be almost too cute for words if it weren’t for Altman’s tendency toward fascinated detachment.
The film seems to have become almost obscure, which is a criminal shame. If nothing else, it ably demonstrates how Elliott Gould became a sex symbol in the early 1970s, something I’d never really understood before. The plot is gripping, there’s one particular set piece that deserves to be remembered as one of the greatest-ever moments of cinema, and the ending is a calculated, but certainly not heavy-handed, reversal of the sublime closing scene of The Third Man. What’s not to love?