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Customer Reviews of McCabe & Mrs. Miller

A Masterpiece of Any Genre
"McCabe & Mrs. Miller" has long been considered one of the best films ever made and is considered Robert Altman's masterpiece (even though his only film to make The American Film Institute's Top 100 is M*A*S*H). The movie is one of the saddest movies you'll likely see. Although, keep in mind, I thought films like The Virgin Suicides and All the Real Girls were sad...So maybe I'm not the best judge of sadness. Anyway, Warren Beatty plays McCabe, a gambler, who arrives in the town of Presbyterian Church; A town that seems to always have a gray cloud hanging over it. This town embodies sadness. It's always dark, always gray, always raining or snowing. McCabe, in the beginning of the film, walks into a saloon, makes sure he knows where the back door is, walks back outside, comes in with a sheet, and covers a table. You hear people talking in the background about how they've heard about McCabe and how they heard that he shot a man...This seems like pointless candor, but it actually prepares us for an important scene much later in the movie. With his winnings from the gambling, McCabe buys three women so he can open up a brothel. His three women are pretty ugly, his brothel poor looking (although he plans to open a brothel and saloon). That's when he meets Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), although why she's "Mrs." Miller is never quite clear. Mrs. Miller, a Cockney woman, quickly decides she wants to be McCabe's partner and the two see that it will work out best for both of them. McCabe is one of those characters that doesn't talk a lot and when he does, he's either talking to himself or muttering in low-tones. One of the most famous lines in the movie is something he says to himself "I got poetry in me." Whenever he talks to himself, it seems like he's saying things he wants to say to Mrs. Miller. The movie sets up the end of the film long before the ending rolls around. Some men arrives from a mining company and offer McCabe some money for his holdings. He names a price, they reject him, and later realizes he's made a mistake. He knows that the men will send someone to kill him. There's one (you probably can't even call it a) sub-plot involving a kid played by Keith Carradine, who rides into town and "visits" all the girls in the brothel. Before he's to leave, he begins walking across a suspension bridge to buy some socks but finds himself face-to-face with a young gunslinger. This scene is tense and you know the outcome right away, but it's still a very sad moment. This is a scene in the film I find simalar to the Mike Yanagita scene in Fargo. It seems pointless, but it kind of takes the film and puts it into focus. This a brilliant film, an example of what movies should be. It's not the most entertaining film, but it's beautifully photographed, has a haunting score (which isn't actually a score as much as a bunch of songs by Leonard Cohen), and a wonderfully depressing story. Highlighted by outstanding performances by Beatty and Christie, this is a masterpiece. <
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>GRADE: A

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SUBLIME!
Toss all the John Ford drek in the trash; this is the best western of all time

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The real west, brought to life with a harsh, brutal beauty
C'mon now, fess up: did you ever really believe in John Wayne as a cowboy? Or any of the other actors from 30s, 40s and 50s westerns? With their clean shirts, their white hats, their crisp scarves and their middle-America ethics, they were about as convincing as Harrison Ford as the president of the United States. The westerns of times past were about what we wanted the west to be, not what it was. Because the real west wasn't pretty and it wasn't romantic. It stank! <
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>With this movie I was able to believe in the western setting for the first time. Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (from a novel by Edmund Naughton) not only deconstructs the cliches--the lone hero standing up to lots of bad guys, the hooker with a heart of gold, the town that pulls together--it suggests far more plausible realities about how the west was won. Altman's town is in business for its own survival. While, as Roger Ebert points out, "everybody knows everybody," and has long before the picture started, there's no team spirit here. Each character is a mercenary, and no one is noble. That's probably how it was in the real west if you wanted to survive past next Tuesday. That's probably why the film focuses so much on the church--it's a little bastion of relief after all the hypocracy that goes on from Monday through Saturday. <
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>Early on Beatty's McCabe says he is trying to get away from "partners," people coming into his life and telling him what to do. One of Altman's central points is you cannot do that in a world that mirrors an organism, where many parts and not the single cell are what determine survival. More even than Fred Schepisi's excellent and underrated Barbarosa (1976), this western is about the anti-hero. Or maybe the non-hero. We sense McCabe will not escape the men who want his business interest from the first time they meet--everyone seems to figure that out but him. Mrs. Miller also seems to be fleeing something--we're never sure what exactly--but she appears out of whole cloth looking for McCabe and says she was "sent" to look for him, not really explaining anything with that explanation. Her motivation for hooking up with him remains elusive to me. She could have done better elsewhere. --Or maybe she just needed a man to boss around. <
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>The rest of the cast do what ensemble casts do in Robert Altman films: they advance the director's bird's eye view of his surroundings. From the quirky Shelley Duvall to the low-key John Schuck, they inhabit a brutal world, both emotionally and physically. Conditions are harsh. Everyone and everything is dirty. Nights are dark. Comforts are few, and are mostly found in the bottle and in intercourse, both social and carnal. Is it any wonder these people care only about themselves? <
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>And that was the final message I took away from McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Towns--and business empires, and everything else--are founded by tough people who persevere and are anything but the romantic idealized symbols they become much later. The west of John Ford, of William Wyler, with tall cowboys and god-fearin' townsfolk, is comforting. It's a Disneyland vision of how we came to be, with a higher purpose as part of the mix. But whether it's big corporations or big towns, their survival was the result of violent actions, amoral choices and pure survival instinct. It's that instinct that McCabe, despite being his own sort of anti-hero, lacks, and pays the ultimate price for. Wal-Mart comes to town. That's part of the American story too. We subscribe to this myth that America is the land of rugged individualism, but in fact America embodies the collective corporate more probably than any other non-totalitarian country on the face of the earth. Or maybe even counting totalitarian countries--it's just a different kind of totalitarianism. Freedom, Altman tells us, is a myth, or at least the type of freedom Americans always hold to be theirs and theirs uniquely. It's not the kind of film to leave you with a smile as you walk out of the theater, but then, most of Robert Altman's movies aren't. In a way, this film is the antithesis to Wyler's The Big Country, which tells us that there's plenty of everything for everybody, and everyone can have his piece. In the 1950s, that seemed true enough. By the time we reached the 1970s, however, the world was a different place. <
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>The film is gorgeously shot by one of my favorite cinematographers, Vilmos Zsigmund. It's a cold beauty, but if you can find poetry in mud puddles and cloudy skies, you will be impressed. (This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where rain is actually *beautiful.*) The extremely low-key lighting matches the mood, and makes us feel cut off from the rest of the world. (I don't know why Gordon Willis got slammed so much in Godfather for his lack of light when this movie was made a year earlier and is every bit as dark.) Leonard Cohen's songs are a perfect complement. Their contemporary feel and lyrics tell us that the western genre is being deconstructed, once and for all. <
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>For some people, McCabe and Mrs. Miller may not be their cup of tea. It's a film that yields more after subsequent viewings. There's not a lot of plot, and a few elements that are there still baffle me--the shooting of one coyboy in cold blood for no apparent reason, for example. The film takes its time to get from point A to point B, and in this post-Star Wars world that may prove frustrating to some. Still, for those who take their time with it, McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a beautiful poem about the west, both the real one and the one that exists solely in our imaginations. <
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>The print is good, though not pristine. The music track sounds fine, but sometimes the dialogue is murky and hard to understand--even for Altman. Supposedly he was asked to clean up some of the sound elements and for some reason refused. The trailer is, surprisingly, anamorphic. (You won't care unless you have an HDTV.) There's not much for extras, just an Altman commentary (that's pretty good for once) and a short TV behind-the-scenes documentary. I liked this film a lot--to me it's another one of those great "70s sensibility" flicks like Chinatown and Godfather and Network--but I can understand how it might be an acquired taste, especially today.