Robert Altman’s wildly ambitious film uses the short stories of Raymond Carver to piece together an allegorical world of characters who make up the less glamorous portion of America. There are nine stories in all, interwoven in an innovative, jazz-like structure, and so many different characters that at least one of them is bound to strike close to home. Though this sort of summary does little justice to the stories, they go as follows: Annie Ross plays a decaying saloon singer whose daughter (Lori Singer) is a classical cellist, in a story in which their two kinds of music intonate the emotional dissonance between parents and children, lovers and losers; a young mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) works as a telephone sex girl; and cop (Tim Robbins) cheats on his wife (Madeline Stone) with another woman (Frances McDormand) whose helicopter pilot ex-husband (Peter Gallagher) takes a grotesque revenge on her; a waitress (Lily Tomlin) married to a boozing limo driver (Tom Waits) accidentally hits the young son of a TV commentator (Bruce Davison) and his wife (Andie McDowell), and Davison’s father (Jack Lemmon) does a nine-minute confessional speech that’s almost unbearable in its naked self-exposure. Lyle Lovett is a baker who plays a bizarre role in this family’s fate; three buddies (Fred Ward, Buck Henry and Huey Lewis) go off on a fishing trip and find the nude body of a murdered girl in the river. Matthew Modine, Anne Archer, Julianne Moore, Lili Taylor, Chris Penn and Robert Downey, Jr. round out one of the most remarkable casts in any American film. (1993, 189 min.)
