...Robert Altman's The Player is nothing short of grotesque in it's fluid exposure of a void known as Hollywood where people, blind to the emptiness of their lives, talk bullshit to themselves in the form of movie pitches and movie gossip; injected with pretension and bitterness. But there is one person who has his eyes open; Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), a movie executive who spends his life listening to awful movie pitches and pondering over threatening postcards he receives in the mail...
The Player is not often an easy film to digest. It's cold, detached, and the only interesting and half-likeable character in it is a murderer. The story is not hugely interesting, but arresting and refreshing in it's simplicity; a movie executive receives threatening postcards from a writer he didn't get back to. They meet after a movie and then go to a bar where an argument ensues. After they leave, they get into a fight, and the writer ends up dead. But the postcards continue to come as he becomes infatuated with the writer's ex; a painter. So it's a typical murder/guilt/blackmail story, or it would be if being pitched like in this movie. So what lifts this film beyond that? The answer: Robert Altman; plain and simple. His stylish direction injects this film with a suffocating sense of claustrophobia and paranoia. Aside from the snappy, natural and convicing dialogue (much of it improvised), this is a truly visual work. Jean Lepine's cinematography is naturalistic, but manages to capture a kind-of cold, piercing heat. But perhaps the defining visual aspect of this film is it's camerawork. The opening 8-minute tracking shot takes us around a movie studio, from Griffin Mill's office, to a tour guide, to various studio execs, and back to Mill again, as he receives his daily postcard, and looks back at us through the blinds with the eyes of a frightened child. The camera follows Mill constantly; sometimes he is obscured by shadowy Hollywood people, their constant whispering like the sound of flies eating a corpse, and sometimes he is alone and confessional, with his equally detached new girlfriend, played by Greta Scacchi. Indeed Griffin Mill seems to be suffocated by these false, sad people, and finds that the only person as genuine (but cynical) as him is this woman. Have these two achieved clarity beyond the petty and phony world? Or are they shamelessly exploitative of the people around them? The film is full of ambiguities, twists and turns, like a movie. It fools us, and leaves us mistrustful of what we've seen. It is infatuated with film, like the Hollywood it portrays. Yet as stylistically brilliant as it is, many of the stylistic touches become very repetitive, as if Altman, who hadn't seen success for so long, were desperately clinging onto the brilliance he had found, and ultimately lost sight of any clear point. For I don't think the film adds up to much whatsoever. As an ambiguous exploration of the nothingness that plagues Hollywood it works, but it doesn't climb any mountains. The use of real Hollywood people in cameos is bold and audacious, but like the movie referencing and name-dropping it becomes dreadfully repetitive. I also think the film wastes some great characters; Vincent D'Onoforio's bitter, angry and unsuccessful screenwriter, Whoopi Goldberg's light-hearted but morally lax detective, even it's main character isn't explored with much depth. Perhaps it's because this film is so misanthropic, it doesn't want to explore the people it watches. The camera is a ghost, hiding amongst the people it curses; Griffin Mill's ghost. This film seems trapped in the world it supposedly "attacks," and does nothing to break free. Instead we're treated to an ironic ending in which this film itself is pitched to Mill by someone who could be the real screenwriter who threatened him at the beginning...or maybe the film is a hollow dream in Mill's mind based off the pitch he just heard. Anyway, Mill goes back to a beautiful Hollywood home to be greeted by his beautiful wife (Greta Scacchi) and they both live the Hollywood dream, rising above the reality of their existence and into a movie existence. The film starts off so promisingly then falls in love with it's own misanthropy and complete lack of empathy, and like Griffin Mill it rises into respectability and success in the Hollywood it portrays...and a satire shouldn't be respectable and shouldn't be praised by the community it's against... So the film fails as a satire and succeeds as a lighthearted, self-conscious comedic sneer at Hollywood. It was Altman's comeback, and the assuredness of the film shows that he knew it would be his comeback. So finally the film is entertaining, technically brilliant, subtle, stylish, grotesque, detached, and lazily half-hearted and accepting...
