Critics reviews

A transformative film experience. History with mystery. Beautiful, inexact, evocative, humorous, wise, wicked. A turning point in film music.

Altman himself called McCabe & Mrs. Miller, an adaptation of writer Edmund Naughton’s 1959 novel, an “anti-western,” a description that seems both acute and yet also something of a miscue in terms of what the film actually does. On a narrative level, it’s actually a perfect western, essaying basic themes and conflicts that run like a seam of ore through the genre canon.

The film is time travel, as sensually immersive as any American film of any era. The manifestation of the foggy Pacific Northwest in the 1880s (abetted famously by Vilmos Zsigmond's pre-flashing the film stock) has the intoxicating quality of a gaslight memory, a diffuse smoky, groggy return to the past.

McCabe's ambition to open a saloon and brothel is fulfilled, despite his bluster, only thanks to the business sense of Julie Christie's Mrs. Miller; their partnership, a business arrangement even as a romance, allows Altman to mount perhaps the most comprehensive revisionist Western, and surely the most bittersweet.

Beatty looks particularly lost, although that works great: He's a camera subject at his best when looking slackjawed and befuddled (yet handsome, even with a scruffy beast of a beard that sometimes seems to devour his whole head). Whatever happened, it translated into a touching performance, giving us a man who wants to put on airs but is thwarted at nearly every turn. (Christie, likewise, has never been more electric; the two weren't just off-screen lovers but a fine, amusing screen duo.)

There isn't a conventional sound or image to be found in Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which exhilaratingly upends the audience's senses, engaging one in a free-floating fashion that's more in sync with the emotional effect of art with less intermediary filters than cinema, such as theater and live music.

The movie was a box-office failure, but it confirmed Altman's standing as a director with a singular vision and the brashness necessary to achieve greatness in a collaborative medium. With his next eight films, he created a body of work unsurpassed in American film history for its unrestrained whimsy, technical innovation, and audacious anatomization of national culture.

Altman may have intended to create a film that was "against" the Western, much in the same way his M*A*S*H (1970) was intended to go "against" the propagandist war film. Like that earlier release, McCabe & Mrs. Miller modernizes certain elements of its respective genre, pushing the limits of controversial content and purposely skewing familiar icons and tropes, but its foundation, however much the facade has been altered, remains sturdy and true.

It's hard not to suspect that something about Cohen's cultivated murmur seeped into Altman's ideas about barely overheard dialogue, which come to fruition in this film and determine its aural gestalt more than Cohen does, rendering it as groundbreaking sonically as it is visually. But it's worth remembering that [...Cohen's songs are] far from the only music in McCabe & Mrs. Miller—and that consciously heard or not, every bit of that music is both gorgeous and meaningful.

If the outline [of the ending] smacks of counter-cultural point-scoring (and at least since Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 a last-reel demise as de rigueur for this era's martyred icons), the sequence transcends any political posturing through Altman's characteristically unruly grace.

With all the recent crowing about the end of the West, it may be time to revisit the last of the Westerns—Altman's dismantling of the frontier... Quick on the heels of M&M's success comes the Corporation, which these days may be a legal Person but even then had no soul for poetry. When and where does expansion end? In the snow, alone, with the last contraction of the heart.

Existing in a middle ground between the life affirming qualities of the Vancouver landscape where it was shot and his own self-loathing anti-human biases, McCABE is probably Robert Altman's most satisfying work. Roger Ebert, who can be credited with perpetuating much of the film's initial success, called it "an elegy for the dead," but as it progresses McCABE feels more like an elegy for the living; it's a film about misdirected intentions, poorly communicated emotions, and failed opportunities.