McCabe & Mrs. Miller

http://www.renaud-bray.com

http://www.renaud-bray.com

The greatest of Robert Altman's '70s genre revisions (which include The Long Goodbye and Thieves Like Us), McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a film steeped in '60s counterculture idealism that lays to rest heroic myths of the Old West. Warren Beatty stars as McCabe, a slightly dim but goodhearted gambler who, with the help of a no-nonsense, opium-smoking madam, Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie in an Oscar-nominated performance), sets up a successful brothel in a Pacific Northwest mining town. Taking the classic western's essential plot element -- a loner at odds with established society (in this case, a ruthless mining corporation) -- Altman spins a poetic vision of the frontier that is at once romantic and antiromantic, unsentimental in its take on love yet as delicate in texture as a Victorian valentine. Eschewing the dusty, wide-open spaces typical of the genre, McCabe and Mrs. Miller offers the most authentic and perfectly realized depiction of the Old West ever put on film. The smoky warmth of cramped and dimly lit interiors is contrasted to brilliant effect with rain-and-snow-shrouded exteriors, particularly during the final, unforgettable shootout, wherein McCabe confronts the mining company mercenaries sent to kill him. Shot in desaturated color by the legendary Vilmos Zsigmond, the film has the hazy beauty of an antique photograph underscored by the haunting strains of Leonard Cohen's mournful ballads. Every character, down to the most minor, feels fully rounded and alive, and such Altman regulars as Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine, and John Schuck all shine. Turning the whore-with-a-golden-heart cliché on its head, Christie's Mrs. Miller is intelligent and enigmatic, with an emotional frigidity mirrored in the icy landscape: She makes the besotted McCabe pay for her sexual favors right up to the end, yet reveals heartbreaking flashes of tenderness and compassion. And Beatty, in his finest performance, is both funny and moving as a man in love with a woman he can't comprehend. Lyrical and deeply sad, McCabe and Mrs. Miller reinvented the western for the 1970s and became one of the enduring masterpieces of American cinema. [Kryssa Schemmerling, Barnes & Noble]