McCabe & Mrs. Miller

What a sad, pitiless, heartbreaking film.

Warren Beatty is McCabe, an entrepreneur who comes to a Cascade mining town and sets up shop running the world’s second-oldest business. Julie Christie is Mrs. Miller, a lifetime whore and a natural businesswoman. Together, they make a go of things. That is, until real businessmen come to town.

Robert Altman directed this film, giving it a textured, living feel of conversations half-heard, buildings half-completed, and people with lives of their own. The great Leonard Cohen provided the music, a folk-influenced group of songs that speak of loss and longing and the sad, sad hope for a better day.

I admit that I never really got Warren Beatty before this picture. He’s funny in HEAVEN CAN WAIT, but even there Jack McCorkle outclasses him. In MCCABE & MRS. MILLER, Beatty incandesces with hope and hustle and an innocently amoral belief in the sanctity of business and the assurances of older, supposedly wiser men. I believed in his character from the moment I saw him, and felt for his character on every step of his seemingly inexorable journey.

Julie Christie, however, I got the first time I saw her in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. She’s smart, tough, and vulnerable, all at once. I believed in her past and her present, and I felt for her, as well.

Many other characters live in the world of this film, and Altman is the kind of director who gives them lives beyond the edges of the frame. Perhaps this is the film’s greatest accomplishment: I never felt that I was watching actors come on, hit their marks, and say their lines. I felt that I was something of a recording angel, swirling around and about these real people as they made their decisions and tried to find their respective places. This may be the film’s greatest accomplishment: the creation of an entire world in a snowy mountain town, and the conjuration of spirits to live in them.