Dreamscape

By Richard Schnickel

3 WOMEN

Directed and Written by ROBERT ALTMAN

People who insist on recounting their dreams are like people who insist on reciting the plots of movies they have just seen: usually they don't remember the key story points and usually they don't know what it was all about. And, of course, they are dreadful bores. Robert Altman, generally the most interesting of directors, forthrightly admits that 3 Women is based on some nightwork he recently did, but his candor regarding the source of the movie does not redeem it from tedium.

To his credit, Altman has found a realistic landscape, the Southern California desert, that is also a very persuasive analogue to a dream landscape--essentially empty, so that it throws its few symbolic structures into high relief. And the film's three title characters have the air of dream works about them. Tantalizingly, even hilariously real some of the time in speech and manner, they yet manage to drift away, eluding the grasp of understanding.

Early in the film, Altman establishes a relationship between two physiotherapists working at a Palm Springs spa for the aged. Millie (Shelley Duvall) is a willing prisoner of the consumer culture. She thinks that if she faithfully makes all the recipes in the ladies' magazines and accepts their hints on home decoration, goodness and popularity will follow her all the days of her life. Indeed, wish being father to the deed, she is convinced that she is well liked and is entirely oblivious to the fact that none of her acquaintances can stand her. Except, that is, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), her roommate and disciple--a drifter for whom any home is better than none. Eventually, after an accident that almost kills Pinky Rose, they exchange roles. For a while it seems that Altman may be making an American Persona--not as subtle as Bergman's great film, but hipper and with more direct social comment.

But that reckons without the third woman (Janice Rule), a painter of weird murals and wife of the sometime stunt man who owns the apartment house where the others live and the tumbledown roadhouse where they drink. Her work, her silences and solitude, more obviously--and less interestingly--symbolize a sterility similar to that of the younger women. In the end, the women dispose of the stunt man (who has had all three of them) and are seen to be forming a sort of feminine trinity --mother, daughter and granddaughter. They seem at once mad and serene. Maybe Altman is exorcising some sort of masculine guilt here. Surely he is displaying some of the virtues associated with him: fine acting performances, expert cinematography, some wild humor. But he should have taken his dream first to a psychiatrist for analysis, then perhaps to a writer for dramatic structuring. Altman has indulged himself mightily, and however great his talent, there is no reason to add the public's indulgence to his own.

Richard Schickel

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