Subversives

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

A WEDDING

Directed by Robert Altman

Screenplay by John Considine, Patricia Resnick, Allan Nicholls and Robert Altman

It begins as a comedy of expensive manners, a satirical account of the marriage between a young man of good family and a young woman of not such good, but equally well-off family. They don't have just a photographer to record this less-than-historic occasion, an entire documentary film crew has been engaged to shoot it. And the presiding clergyman is not merely the local minister but a bishop no less, and what matter that his miter is sweat-stained or that he is senile?

Then A Wedding cracks open, revealing disorders deeper than social pretension. The matriarch of the groom's family dies in her upstairs bedroom as the wedding party returns home for the reception, and those who know of it conspire to keep it a secret until the party is over. But the immediate cause of death may have been her discovery that no one beyond the immediate family has accepted the invitation. Seems they're still ostracizing the groom's mother because of a brief marriage years before to an Italian waiter. Of course that lady is a drug addict who gets her fixes from the alcoholic family doctor.

Not that the bride's family is any bargain. They seem to be collateral relatives of the Snopeses. If the bride's sister has not been made pregnant by the groom, then the deed was done by one of his 20-odd barracks mates from the military academy. Her uncle is a fundamentalist minister who got the call from God speaking through a Holiday Inn TV set. Her mother spends much of the wedding day arranging to meet an absurdly romantic uncle of the groom's in a motel across from a Dairy Queen in Tallahassee.

Perverse? No, the picture is downright subversive, a brutal comic assault on that most basic of institutions, the family. The attack is every bit as relentless, unfair and "tasteless" as Altman's devastation of the military was in M*A*S*H. Although the family is certainly undergoing change and questioning, the director does not have a national mood of disgust (which Viet Nam provided for the earlier picture) to support him. All he has is his own disarming skill as a moviemaker to keep audiences in an accepting mood.

It is very nearly enough. Many of his sharpest thrusts are contained in throwaway lines, which may be all but covered by the overlapping dialogue Altman loves to use. He demonstrates an uncanny skill at staging. His camera seems to eavesdrop almost simultaneously on a dozen conversations that reveal, in a few lines of dialogue or a fleeting expression, brilliantly encapsulated characterizations. As always, his location is full of expressive artifacts, shrewdly chosen and revealed.

The casting is both daring and first-rate. Altman has somehow made an ensemble out of a group that includes (in no particular order of significance) Lillian Gish, Pat McCormick, Howard Duff, Vittorio Gassman, Dina Merrill, Nina van Pallandt, Lauren Hutton, Mia Farrow, Geraldine Chaplin, Desi Arnaz Jr., Amy Stryker, Paul Dooley, various veterans of his stock company and a title card full of newcomers. They are all wonderful. If someone deserves to be singled out, it is Carol Burnett, who plays the bride's up tight but restless mother. For her to appear in this film took guts; for her to play her part with such total commitment to its pathetic absurdity is an act of courage.

The picture has its flaws. It would not have been harmed by the introduction of a few characters who have some common decency. Even a certain amount of libidinal restraint might have made an interesting contrast to all the comings and goings into the bushes and the mansion's upstairs rooms. And the director and his co-writers had made clear their position about the nature of American middle-class life long before they tacked on a gratuitously fiery climax to the film.

For all that, however, one cannot help comparing the jumpy life of this film to the becalmed chill of that other recent assault on the sterility of bourgeois life, Woody Allen's Interiors. The contrast is all in favor of Altman. The people in A Wedding are capable of bursting their schematic bounds, of bouncing into wayward life and, in an odd way, undercutting the director's underlying message of disapproval. In the end, Altman the observant artist manages to subvert Altman the highly conventional social critic. --Richard Schickel

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