‘I’ll tell you something. I’ve got poetry in me…’
The films of Robert Altman are an acquired taste. He goes for authentic, slice-of-life, almost verité cinema that could also be dismissed as just a bunch of people in rooms having mumbled conversations. And while much of McCabe & Mrs. Miller is that, when it’s good, it’s astounding…
John McCabe (Warren Beatty), a gambler with poetry in his soul, and Constance Miller (Julie Christie), a hard-headed prostitute, begin a business partnership together in a remote Old West mining town.
Much of the first half of the film feels like you have stumbled into an actual old-timey saloon and are listening in on the conversations of the various ne’er-do-wells that inhabit them. While this sounds like a compliment, much of it is quite plodding. The film comes to life in the snowy denouement that forces us to confront the fact that life wasn’t romantic in the Old West – it was dangerous and unfair.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller is an anti-Western inasmuch as Altman subverts everything we would expect to see in a Western. Instead of the sunkissed vistas and warm oranges and yellows, he shoots the Old West in shadow and, often lit by firelight, and with a total lack of colour. Both Beatty and Christie feel like real human beings with all the flaws and foibles that come with that, with Beatty particularly at home in this stark landscape. He convinces as a hard-drinking, hard-gambling drifter, and he shares a raw energy with Christie that is hard to ignore.
While I can’t see myself returning to McCabe & Mrs. Miller any time soon, there is no denying that this film is the antidote to hundreds of derivative Westerns that came before it.
