3 WOMEN, 1 BLOG: Altman Goes To Dreamland

As a general rule, I like to go into the movies I review in this space as cold as I possibly can. I try not to look up analyses or reviews ahead of time, and I definitely don’t peruse any plot details. Sometimes it’s just not possible with something that has completely permeated popular culture to the point that references are simply unavoidable (say, something like GOODFELLAS or A CLOCKWORK ORANGE). Sometimes, it just doesn’t matter; what difference does the element of surprise make when you’re breaking down fucking JAWS 3-D? But in general, I only allow myself basic story setups and cast lists for review. This theoretically gives me two advantages:

1) the movie is given the opportunity to unroll on its own terms, without any sort of behind-the-scenes drama or famous inspirations behind it attempting to inform me what it should be;

2) it gives me the chance to experience movies that have been around for twenty, thirty, almost fifty years in the way that audiences at the time might have. I want it to feel like picking up a newspaper, browsing the entertainment section for showtimes (yes, this used to exist) and exclaiming “Hey, it’s a new Altman! I like him! Let’s check it out” before heading down to the theater and just….seeing what happens.

Well, this week, this process really put me in a pickle. 3 WOMEN got on my radar essentially off of a recommendation (thanks, Tony!). I had vaguely heard of it, I was aware of who starred in it. But that’s it. So far, Advantage #2 was coming through in spades.

However, as you probably are already aware, Altman’s 1977 impressionist classic is not an easy movie to just go ahead and unpack the first time around, unless you happen to have a degree from Johns Hopkins or something. Let me tell you, living in a time where every other film is booked as having “psychological thriller” elements, 3 WOMEN is one of the true “psychological” films I really can think of.

More to the point, it really, really is a film where some prior research into Altman’s intent and inspiration would have been handy. Because it’s palpably different from Altman’s most famous works, so unbelievably so that, even as I struggled to grapple with the film in the days after watching it, the thought crossed my mind that Altman might really be the best American director of his generation, so deep is his versatility.

For anybody hoping to see a man stumble through a psych class term paper, you’ve come to the right place. 3 WOMEN!

3 WOMEN (1977)

Starring: Sissy Spacek, Shelly Duvall, Janice Rule

Directed by: Robert Altman

Written by: Altman

Released: April 3, 1977

Length: 124 minutes

The story: timid and wide-eyed Pinky Rose (Spacek) starts her first day at a geriatric “health spa” located in a middle-of-nowhere California dust bowl town and immediately becomes infatuated with her gabby, effortlessly cool coworker Millie Lammoreaux (Duvall). When Millie’s roommate moves out of their room at the Purple Sage Apartments, Pinky immediately snags the opening. The two spend their time hanging out at the Dodge City saloon, owned by ex-stunt double Edgar Hart (Robert Fortier) and his mute painter wife Willie (Rule). As Pinky’s infatuation grows, her personality begins to resemble that of Millie’s. Subsequently, Millie seems to regress the further the film goes on.

The movie obviously goes on from there, but to continue would technically be to….well, not ruin the movie entirely (it’s not a film that can really be ruined by reading the plot synopsis); it’s just…well, it’s hard to describe in words exactly what the movie is fully about. Put it this way: it’s one thing to read the story of 3 WOMEN, it’s quite another to experience it. It’s both loosely plotted and intensely fixated on character dynamics, both subtle and quite bold, at once emotional and cerebral.

3 WOMEN is surreal in the sense that every moment feels both disconnected from the ones before and after it, yet it all feels completely intertwined as a piece. In that sense, the filmography that came to mind while watching this was David Lynch’s, and I became convinced 3 WOMEN was a major influence on the future TWIN PEAKS creator’s work. However, I really couldn’t find any evidence to corroborate that, and I was reminded that Lynch is sort of infamous for not watching that many other movies, so who knows.

Still, it’s hard not think about MULHOLLAND DRIVE, a movie with very similar themes and a somewhat analogous setup (two women meet by chance, and find their identities becoming intertwined), as well as a movie that saw Lynch go up directly against Altman’s GOSFORD PARK in the 2001 Best Director Oscar race (they would both lose to Ron Howard for A BEAUTIFUL MIND. Hollywood!). I’m also aware that there are strong comparisons to be made to Bergman’s PERSONA (in fact, it was a direct influence for Altman), and I feel caught a little flat-footed that I haven’t seen it. Another argument for my ongoing film literacy!

To that end, something else that made 3 WOMEN such a difficult movie for me to go into cold was that my still only cursory knowledge of Altman’s major works did nothing to prepare myself for it. There’s nothing in M*A*S*H, MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER, CALIFORNIA SPLIT or THE LONG GOODBYE to indicate the man was capable of something so impressionistic (although subsequent research suggests something like BREWSTER MCCLOUD might have clued me in; can anybody confirm?). Sure, it’s rooted in that improvisational looseness that had long since become Altman’s trademark (more on that in a second), and his impeccable knack for casting actors who would wind up legends of their time is on full display. But it’s such a departure of what I’ve seen so far, it kind of threw me for a loop.

If you haven’t caught on yet, I feel completely unequipped to really unpack 3 WOMEN, at least not on just one watch. The first screening seems to be meant solely to just take it all in. It feels like it practically demands at least a couple of subsequent re-viewings to start taking in details and themes. For instance, I definitely know what feelings Pinky’s bad dream and the pool murals evoked in me (in both cases, an intense dissettlement); I just couldn’t tell you what they precisely mean.

To be clear, this isn’t the same thing as the complaint I levied against Kubrick’s THE SHINING, which I’ve always found so vague in intent as to be almost meaningless (an opinion that I sense I am increasingly alone in holding). No, here Altman is being very specific, I’m just missing what some of the details are supposed to indicate. In this case, Bobby, it’s me, not you.

For what it’s worth, Altman has claimed the inspiration for 3 WOMEN came to him in his sleep in the form of an anxiety dream that developed while his wife was laid up in the hospital. Specifically, he dreamt that he was shooting a movie about stolen identities in the desert that starred…Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek. He woke up in the middle of his dream, started writing notes down on a pad, then went back to his strangely prophetic dreamscape.

Post-dream, Altman collaborated with screenwriter Patricia Resnick (who would go on to work on, among other things, 9 TO 5 and the final season of Mad Men) to develop a treatment for this project, which wound up being about fifty pages. Resnick, by the way, would go on to collaborate with Altman many times after this, starting with 1978’s A WEDDING. That screenplay was largely skirted in favor of in-the-moment improvisations, allowing Duvall in particular to have a lot of agency in developing Millie’s character on the set. his was just as well: Altman didn’t intend to really have a screenplay at all, which tracks with what the movie truly felt like, and what made it sing.

Because 3 WOMEN isn’t so much a movie about words as it is about characters, behavior and images. The power of the film comes down to establishing firmly and quickly the differences between Pinky and Millie, then slowly watching as their personalities begin to intertwine, then shift back. Right off the bat, we can palpably feel the differences between our two leads. Where Millie is chatty and outgoing (even as, it turns out, she isn’t as beloved by her peers as she wants to believe), Pinky is intense, eager and interior. Much of the power of the film is seeing the two change as they continue to interact, almost as if they’re being brought together by some cosmic (or dream) force.

What might stand out amidst all of the above is that, hmmmm, I only really count two women there. Well, the third woman is the aforementioned mute wife Willie, and it’s here that I admit to being a little stymied. Her big contribution to the film are the creation of the aforementioned murals at the bottom of the pool at Dodge City. Plot-wise, she suffers a stillborn birth and is probably complicit with the other two women in the murder of Edgar.

So, yeah, someone smarter than me may need to jump in here and give a dissertation on Willie. If I had to make a guess (and since you’ve been nice enough to read this, I think I at least owe you a blind stab), I’ve taken Willie’s stillness, in every unfortunate sense of the word, to be the sort of axis against which Willie and Pinky shift up, then down again, throughout the course of the film. I also feel like it isn’t coincidence that all three women essentially have the same name; Millie and Willie are separated by just one letter that are basically identical. As well, it’s revealed that Pinky’s birth name is Mildred, or Millie.

Now, there are much, much, much deeper analyses of 3 WOMEN out there that views the movie through the prism of dream theory, and the way that people in a dream are able to kind of shift characters within that dreamscape. To that end, the common interpretation is that the three women represent the shifting psyche, personalities and lifetimes within one woman (the infatuated child, the liberated young woman, and the older mother). It all sounds right to me, although I certainly don’t have the credentials to really dig into any that.

But, the thing is, even if you didn’t give a whiff about any of the psychoanalysis of it all, the damn thing works kinda just on the surface level of “creepy roommate” movie. Spacek plays her wide-eyed obsession so well! It’s certainly not necessarily a subtle performance (you know almost immediately there’s something off about her), but it’s also not overplayed, a mighty difficult balance to strike. Spacek is a performer that I actually haven’t seen in as many things as I had thought, yet her biggest hits loom so large that it feels like I’ve grown up with her anyway. Here, Spacek plays Pinky’s obsession straight instead of going for overtly creepy. She also plays Pinky’s lack of clear identity perfectly. You even feel a twinge of weird sympathy for her as she appears to freak out on the couple that claim to be her parents after her suicide attempt (the movie takes turns).

I’ve alluded in the past to how I’m mostly on the outside looking in in regards to the allure that Shelly Duvall has held on people over the last few generations. I’m not a hater or anything, I’ve just observed that people genuinely adore her to a somewhat intense degree. I don’t know if it’s just that I never grew up with Faerie Tale Theatre as a kid (I am making an assumption this is where most people were introduced to her), paired with the aforementioned lack of strong affinity for THE SHINING. That all said, 3 WOMEN is easily the most I’ve ever liked her. Crucially, you buy her playing “both personalities”, as Millie and Pinky start to swap dispositions and demeanors. She actually might be the biggest reason why the movie works as well as it does.

As for that third woman, crazy thing about Janice Rule: a few years before this movie’s release, the already wildly accomplished actress started studying psychoanalysis, using her fellow acting colleagues as her patients in 1973 (a veritable cornucopia of research opportunities there). She eventually earned her PhD in 1983, and practiced all the way to her death in 2003.

Two other things I wanted to mention: outside of a brief detour into the lyrical content of “Suicide is Painless”, I haven’t talked much about the scores of the Altman movies I’ve already reviewed (an especially egregious error when considered how important the different version of the title tunes are to THE LONG GOODBYE). Something in the opening seconds of 3 WOMEN that struck me immediately, however, was the dichotomy between the setting of the opening scene and the music that accompanies it.

Visually, we are plunged into a senior rehab facility (or “nursing home”, if you want to get pejorative), and it’s the type of facility you’d expect it to look like. It’s sterile, and moderately depressing, but otherwise non-descript. Yet, the Gerald Busby-composed music is quietly tense and sinister, almost like a warning. It sets up how the whole movie feels at times; everything seems recognizable, but you just keep waiting for it all to take a turn (and boy, does it ever).

One last little thing I loved about 3 WOMEN: it is a superb 70’s food movie. Tuna melts, pigs in a blanket, chocolate pudding tarts, something called “penthouse chicken”….although we don’t see much of these 70’s dinner party staples (well, except the tuna melts), the mere threat of them permeates seemingly the entire runtime. Whether this is all part of the dreamscape, or just a quirky little happenstance, it greatly delighted me. I would attend your dinner party, Millie!

In the end, film is a visual medium. More to the point, it’s an art form meant to use images as a vessel for emotion. Thus, even without a PHD in psychology in hand, 3 WOMEN was still able to make me feel strong emotions, even if they were sometimes clouded in confusion. It’s certainly unlike quite anything I’ve seen up to this point, and is possibly the movie that has screamed “revisit me!” the loudest.