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Starring Tim Robbins, Julianne Moore. As a student in a college, creative writing class, I had the great opportunity to read a collection of Raymond Carver's short stories. They were dark, they were gritty, they were about people who needed psychological help, they were concise, and they were fantastically well written. As a film critic, I had the great opportunity to screen Robert Altman's 1992 film, The Player. It was a dark and biting look at the lives of Hollywood studio executives, and splendidly adapted for the silver screen from Michael Tolkien's novel of the same name. Therefore, when I had the opportunity to screen Short Cuts, Robert Altman's adaptation of Raymond Carver's short stories, I felt almost positive that I had a good day of movie viewing ahead of me (it should be noted that Shorts Cuts' running time is an astronomical 189 minutes). However, as is often the case with my assumptions that I will enjoy a certain piece of cinema, I was very wrong; very wrong and very sorry.I knew that Short Cuts was Altman's celluloid adaptation of 9 of Carver's short stories, but, for some reason, was expecting to see 9 self-contained little movies of 30 minutes or so, rather than one long, tangled intersection of all 9. I'm not positive why I was anticipating this, but my guess is that it had something to do with the fact that the name of the film at hand was Short Cuts. Again, though, I was wrong in my assumption. What Short Cuts is, in fact, is over three hours of Altman's merging, cramming, and jamming all 9 Carver stories together into one hideously jumbled mess, with more than 20 characters interacting with each other, in the contexts of the 9 different stories. While some of you might recognize this as a prelude to Altman's 1994 fashion debacle, Ready to Wear, I found it to be an insult to Carver's fiction. Of course, Carver is dead and probably won't voice his opinions on this as loudly as I will, but I digress. One of the most underrated and unappreciated facets of a fictional work of any length or medium is its sense of rhythm. Carver, and especially T. Coraghessan Boyle, understand this, and, while writing, have everything flowing smoothly; the reader gets a sense of who the characters are, what motivates them, and why they do the things they do. One surefire way to wreck a story's rhythm is by creating memorable characters and then shifting the focus of the plot elsewhere. Large character contingents are, for the most part, guaranteed rhythm killers, and this is precisely the case with Short Cuts. Just as it is hard to concentrate on a TV show or cook dinner with the phone ringing every five minutes, it is hard to get comfortable with the characters in a plotline that jumps around like a frog on crack. As I began to identify with the characters in one of the stories, Altman would cut away from them, putting the center of attention on differing characters in a different story. Once comfortable with these new characters, Altman would again focus the camera elsewhere, ultimately creating a mish-mash of tales that, in the end, I didn't really care about, something that was most definitely not true about Carver's fiction. After screening this film, I started to wonder if my recollection of Carver's short stories was misguided; could a movie this bad be adapted from something so well crafted? So I reread my collection of Carver's works and felt quite a sense of relief as his stories turned out to be every bit as crisply and freshly written as I remembered. My suggestion to you is that you avoid Short Cuts, go out, score a copy of the collected works of Raymond Carver (from Barbara's Bookstore) and spend your time reading that instead. And besides, in the amount of time it would take you to watch Short Cuts, chances are good that you'll be able to get though the book a minimum of 6 or 7 times.
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