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| Player, The |
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  (7/10)
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Runtime: 124 |
| Public Rating: 3.97 (29 votes) |
Director: Robert Altman |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Comedy/Drama |
Year: 1992 |
| Writer(s): Michael Tolkin |
| Reviewed by: Vadim Rizov |
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The Player is a bitchily ironic film which, behind its unsentimental veneer and "Let's expose the 'truth' about showbiz" bravura, is really the frustrated work of a man sick and tired of going through nonsense to make his movies, especially since he's considered a great director. That man is Robert Altman, and while this movie looks like his other ones, it's not nearly as deep or perceptive.
I've always had problems with these kinds of "exposes." After all, to whom is it news that Hollywood is filled with assholes and insecure people who muck up the creative process. The Player is not journalism, it's preaching to the choir. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that; it just means that the movie has limitations, namely, the inability to see life in relation to anything but Hollywood and the "creative process." It's a critical look at an insular world from the inside directed at the general public.
Tim Robbins is blandly slimy as Griffin Mill, a man whose work is to listen to pitches (he eases the process by reducing pitches to cinematic arithmatic; he sums up a story about a TV actress hailed as a goddess by an African tribe by saying "Basically, it's The Gods Must Be Crazy minus the Coke bottle and plus a TV actress"; responds the gratified pitch-maker, "Right: it's Out Of Africa meets Pretty Woman"). He's a professional asshole, who weeds out the few marketable ideas from a pile of pitches. He keeps getting threatening letters from an anonymous writer. He thinks he's got the right writer pegged, and murders him. He doesn't, but what does it really matter? His career's on the rise, and the dead man's girlfriend is now his.
Although filled to bursting with characters, The Player is a remarkably shallow film. Every character is a type; even the supposedly eccentric girlfriend (we're supposed to be clued in to this by the fact that she's a painter) is really just a gullible pseudo-artist with a knack for inane, bizarre quotes like "I like words and letters. I'm not crazy about complete sentences." It's the right tack for a movie about Hollywood, but it doesn't make for great filmmaking.
The curious thing about the movie is that there isn't a single really good writer or director in the whole thing (except for Alan Rudolph in a cameo). The figure of redemption in the movie is a British director (nicely played by the usually neurotic Richard E. Grant), who proposes to Mill an awful story about love and the death penalty called "Habeas Corpus." It's a tear-jerker disguised as morally tough art; by the time it's been filmed, Grant's sold out, and it's become a star vehicle (featuring a self-mocking cameo by Bruce Willis) with a happy ending, which mirrors the end of the movie, which allows Griffin to get away with murder. It's a filmmaker's conceit. Fortunately, Altman himself realizes that the film is really not all that hard-edged or vicious (although he doesn't seem to realize that Habeas Corpus is a bad movie, either in its original conception or as an action film). The result is a filmmaker supremely in control of his craft, making an absorbing but shallow film.
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