re: Summer of '78: "A Wedding"

That Fuzzy Bastard — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:06:56 GMT

I know this is widely considered a flop, but I honestly love it. The big reversal with the car crash is, I think, absolutely brilliant---I love the way it leaves you feeling enraged, then relieved, then guilty for feeling relieved. Also, Nina van Pallandt's junkie monologue is a terrific piece of filmmaking---Altman's savvy in finding the one angle from which her face looks terrible, carefully deploying it, and then ending the speech with Pallandt's "You used to think I was beautiful" is a heartbreaking moment, generated almost purely through camerawork.

Like any Altman movie, there's a hundred terrific moments---Mia Farrow's smirking count of sexual partners, the hilarious garden scene with Carol Burnett, the little gay-panic joke. But mostly, I think it adds up to one of Altman's best statements about the changes the counterculture has wrought. He takes an event known for thrusting generations together, then shows how the explosion of the 60s leaves fissures all over two families who were mostly uninvolved in the tumult.