It seems as if in all three of the Robert Altman films we watched in class, ( The Long Goodbye, The Player, and Nashville) there are very few unifying constants, relative to the other directors we've studied of course. The three films are all very different in their own respects, which could be considered good or bad, but there are some underlying aspects of the three films that connect them.
My favorite of the three, The Long Goodbye, and my least favorite, Nashville, seemed to have the least in common. First of all, the most signifecant difference in the two is the narrative. The Long Goodbye is on one side of the scale with a concrete plotline with a single, lone protaganist (Phillip Marlow) who appears in nearly every scene and arguably goes through a change in character by the end of the film. Now Nashville is on the other side of the scale and it's narrative style is essentially the polar opposite of The Long Goodbye. Nashville has at least 20 protaganists, if you could call them that, who may or may not have any importance to the development of the film, and they are completely static characters who go through no changes by the end. The plot of Nashville is also radically different from The Long Goodbye, well in that it basically has no plot. The only thing that could be considered a plot is the assassination in the ending and the development of the music. It's almost as if the only similarities between the two films is that they both deal with murder and death and they both have Elliot Gould as either an actor or a character.
Elliot Gould also plays a short camio as himself in The Player. Despite one of the only unifying themes between the three being Elliot Gould, there are a few similarities between The Player and Nashville, at least more then there are between The Long Goodbye and Nashville. Nashville and The Player both take place in real life with a lot of real life scenarios in american culture, Hollywood and Country Music. This unification makes the two films in my opinion fall under the genre, realistic fiction, the fact that these two films share the same genre is enough for me for them to be pretty similar.
Some people may say that having three of your films lacking a similar style and plot is a result of the directer being uncreative and having ADD, but I think that it is very impressive to have three of your most famous films be so radically different, it takes an immense amount of creativity. So I give kudos to Mr. Robert Altman, you make indeciciveness and ADD seem not so bad.
