Opiniões dos críticos

The charges already brought against California Split for formlessness suggest a grammatical problem more than a real one: its triumphant achievement –- and Altman’s — is to change form from a noun into a verb.

Robert Altman’s California Split is a love story disguised as a gambling movie... The film lives on the fringes of society, but succeeds in part because it never indulges in judgement of its characters.

Some viewers grouse that the picture is aimless or too shaggy, but there is plot – a lot of it, actually... But Altman’s approach to the material is so modest and organic that you never feel the narrative gears grinding. He keeps the focus squarely on Bill and Charlie and is less concerned with what happens to them than with how they react to it, and how they treat each other.

[California Split] is [Altman's] most inviting, and possibly his most purely pleasurable, despite its sucker-punch wrap-up. Gould’s rake lives for “the action”; as he reads the faces of those Reno high-rollers, cracking jokes but also exhibiting awe, he’s happy just to be among them. Watching, we are, too.

[...California Split is] one of those movies so special it's hard to even write about. It's just so alive and breathing and real and charming and sad you can practically smell it. It's a movie I turn to time and time again because, even if I know it's not a healthy world, I want to be in that world again. I want to experience its off-kilter cool, its bummer vibes. I want to, once again, fall in love with its scruffy-cool, wisecracking, charismatic leads.

This simultaneously relaxed and lively swing-fest, a celebration of collective euphoria, shows how deeply akin Altman's style is to the aesthetics of improvised jazz, which at its best tends to thrive not so much through competition as through the kind of sudden inspiration that fellow players can spark in one another.

[California Split] seems a relatively straightforward buddy film... But it’s also an anti-buddy parable in which George Segal and Elliott Gould’s homosocial behavior is equated unflatteringly against their obsessive gambling addictions.

I myself only saw it for the first time last year and suffice it to say that I was so taken with its rough-and-tumble humanity that it was the one Altman film to figure in the Top 10 of all-time list I submitted to Senses of Cinema... There's nothing so novel going on in California Split – a wholly naturalistic picture set in the 1970s – and yet its characters feel just as lonely and pathetic (and lovable) and the outcome of the games they play just as live-or-die important.

[California Split] is a fascinating, vivid movie, not quite comparable to any other movie that I can immediately think of. Nor is it easily categorized... Like all Altman films, "California Split" is dense with fine, idiosyncratic detail, a lot of which is supplied by Mr. Gould and Mr. Segal as well as by members of the excellent supporting cast.

What Altman comes up with is sometimes almost a documentary feel; at the end of "California Split" we know something about organized gambling in this country we didn't know before. His movies always seem perfectly at home wherever they are, but this time there's an almost palpable sense of place. And Altman has never been more firmly in control of his style... "California Split" is a great movie and it's a great experience, too; we've been there with Bill and Charlie.