For anyone who believes that what American movies need most right now is more independent spirit and maverick brilliance -- and more sense of what the country really is, rather than what it should be -- the cinematic re-emergence of Robert Altman is an occasion for bravos.

Dismissed after the "debacle" of 1980's Popeye (a "failure which is still alive and kicking in its surprising video afterlife), exiled for the past dozen years to the seeming hinterlands of cable TV, off-Broadway, and low-budget "drama" movies, Altman came blazing back in 1992 with the Hollywood talk-of-the-town art house hit The Player. Short Cuts confirms his renaissance.

It's a larger, riskier effort than The Player. Returning to the style and strategy of his earlier work, with its interweaving story lines, huge ensemble casts and open-ended narrative, Altman actually tops his official masterpiece, Nashville.

Based on nine stories and a poem by the late Raymond Carver, Short Cuts has become, in this version, a many-sided, many-mooded, dazzlingly structured electronic jazz mural of a city on t he edge.

The stories were conceived separately, except for one wholly invented for the film (a tragic duet between Annie Ross as a drunken, dying jazz singer and Lori Singer -- who does her own playing -- as her classical cellist daughter). And only two of them are in a for fairly close to Carver's. Those are the one's based on "A Small, Good Thing" (about the baker who harasses a couple who haven't picked up their son's birthday cake, unaware that the boy lies comatose after a car accident) and "So Much Water So Close to Home" (about the three fishermen who won't let the discovery of a nude, female corpse disrupt their fishing vacation).

Originally there were no links among the tales, other than thematic ones: Carver's sense of modern urban isolation, the misunderstandings, petty cruelties, and sad silences. So Altman and co-adapter Frank Barhydt, Jr., make the links, find the short cuts. The ensemble is large, various -- pool cleaners and TV commentators, waitresses and jazz singers, chauffeurs and doctors, phone-sex specialists and bakers, make-up artists and fishermen -- and Altman and Barhydt (and editor Geraldine Peroni) concentrate on transitions, leaping from one track to another, making connections between the clusters of characters.

How? Sometimes, as in Nashville (or as in Krzysztof Kieslowski's 1988 10-hour Polish masterpiece, The Decalogue) one character simply shows up as background in a story where he or she doesn't belong. Sometimes characters from different stories will turn out to be relatives. And a few illicit sexual liaisons cross the borderlines, too.

What Short Cuts really is -- and what Carver's widow, poet Tess Gallagher, emphasizes in her shrewd, sympathetic essay, included in chapter 57 of the supplement -- is a jazz variation on her husband's stories, maybe even a jazz symphony. Improvisation is the key to Short Cuts. That's why a jazz score threads through the film, why the bouncy Duke Ellington-Peggy Lee "I'm Gonna Go Fishin' (and Catch Me a Trout)" is the last song we hear with the end titles.

And that's why critiques which accuse Altman of fudging up Carver miss the boat so completely. It's as if, listening to Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie or Art Tatum riff through versions of "I Got Rhythm," critics started complaining that Gershwin's melody was being lost.

Altman's greatness as a director rests principally in that improvisatory brilliance, in his uncanny knack with actors. (In a case so large and uniformly superb, it seems unfair to pick any of them out -- even though the company's elder, Jack Lemmon, is the one handed a big, virtuoso, movie-stealing monologue.) It also lies in what Michael Tolkin (who adapted the screenplay for The Player from his own novel) calls Altman's ability to free up an entire film company to do their best work, his unique obsession with the whole process of making movies -- the fact that he won't quit, no matter what. ("Admire me," Altman said once, "not for how I succeed, not for how 'good' the films are, but for the fact that I keep going back and jumping off the cliff.")

Appropriately for a man who deals in irony, he won back the spotlight in the most impudent way possible: by laying bare the excesses, malaise and hypocrisies of L.A. itself, the very city that had banished him from the inner circles and good tables.

The Player deals with upper-level L.A., the world of the studios, the stars, and executive deals. Short Cuts focuses on the middle-class world that surrounds the them: the sunny, smoggy subdivisions, where the only celebrity around is Alex Trebek of Jeopardy! -- unless you want to count Bruce Davison as KCAL-TV commentator Howard Finnigan, whose vacuous segment on the medfly war is titled "Thoughts to Make You Think."

Altman doesn't show much of a third-level -- the impoverished ghettos and barrios, screened away from these mostly white, middle-class people, and perhaps that's due to the small-town, Pacific Northwest setting of Carver's stories. But African-Americans are on the fringes of several scenes, and the club where Annie Ross works, the Low Note, has an all-white combo and a largely black clientele.

Hollywood studio people tended to love The Player, partly because they recognized the truth of its take on slick-and-slimy deal-making, but also because Altman did it with just enough playfulness to let them off the hook. Yet both of these L.A. movies are fed by the same perception: Beneath the thick veneer of glamor and artifice beats the heart of darkness, emptiness, and even despair. It is a moral quandary that goes mostly unrecognized or unvoiced by these people, simply because they make themselves too busy -- or oblivious, or stoned -- to recognize it.

Some of the Short Cuts characters (Tom Waits' scabrous chauffeur Earl Piggot, Anne Ross' Tess, and maybe Jack Lemmon's prodigal dad, Paul Finnigan) are alcoholics, some potheads, and most seem happy only when they're a little stoked or stoned. Everyone is on edge, particularly Tim Robbins as the bully lecher cop, Gene Shepard, a sex addict and pathological liar, who can never fool his wife (Madeleine Stowe) with any of his infidelity alibis about crack kids and bunco stings, and who tries to dump the family dog because the barking makes him feel guilty.

Short Cuts is one of those marriages of seeming opposites that works. What Altman does with Carver, by placing these people in another of his rich, boisterously populated "collage" films, is to show how every city (especially L.A.) is, in a way, a community of the isolated. Altman's cuts may even give us more of a sense of the truth than Carver's stories alone, because they recognize more of the absurd and terrible interconnections of life, the consequences that most of us choose to ignore.

Part of the greatness of this film, which is one of the triumphs of recent American moviemaking, lies in the inclusiveness of its portrait, the way it gives such an omniscient sense of character, of milieu. And part also lies in Short Cuts' recognition that nothing in life is ever resolved, that -- movies and The Player to be contrary -- there are not only no happy ending, but virtually no endings at all.

--Michael Wilmington

Cast & Credits

Ann Finnigan .. Andie MacDowell

Howard Finnigan .. Bruce Davison

Marian Wyman ... Julianne Moore

Dr. Ralph Wyman ... Matthew Modine

Claire Kane ... Anne Archer

Stuart Kane ... Fred Ward

Lois Kaiser ... Jennifer Jason Leigh

Jerry Kaiser ... Chris Penn

Honey Bush ... Lili Taylor

Bill Bush ... Robert Downey, Jr.

Sherri Shepard ... Madeleine Stowe

Gene Shepard ... Tim Robbins

Doreen Piggot ... Lily Tomlin

Betty Weathers ... Francis McDormand

Stormy Weathers ... Peter Gallagher

Tess Trainer ... Annie Ross

Zoe Trainer ... Lori Singer

Paul Finnigan ... Jack Lemmon

Andy Bitkower ... Lyle Lovett

Gordon Johnson ... Buck Henry

Vern Miller ... Huey Lewis

Music Producer ... Hal Willner

Original Score Combosed By ... Mark Isham

Production Designer ... Stephen Altman

Edited By ... Geraldine Peroni

Director of Photography ... Walt Lloyd

Executive Producer ... Scott Bushnell

Based on the Writings of ... Raymond Carver

Screenplay By ... Robert Altman & Frank Barhydt

Producer ... Cary Brokaw

Directed By ... Robert Altman

Costumes ... John Hay

Associate Producers ... Mike Kaplan & David Levy

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