Time changes so dramatically what people think of a movie. I remember, in college, arguing at a restaurant over whether a film could live up to the value of a book -- whether a movie, especially a fiction movie, could ever match the lyrical intensity and selectivity of textual narrative. I think one factor that implies they can is that how much criticism changes shapes it takes around a given movie. Look at what the New York Times said when Mccabe and Mrs. Miller was new in theaters,
The intentions of "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" are not only serious, they are also meddlesomely imposed on the film by tired symbolism, by a folk-song commentary on the soundtrack that recalls not the old Pacific Northwest but San Francisco's hungry I, and by the sort of metaphysically purposeful photography that, in a tight close-up, attempts to discover the soul's secrets in the iris of an eye and finds, instead, only a very large iris.
Now compare that to what it says about the same movie in 1994:
Though the story is radically unsentimental, the film's images are ravishingly beautiful. The great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond creates the foggy atmosphere of a damp, oppressive Northwestern winter. (Film Forum's new wide-screen print is a must; cropped for some video versions, McCabe, Mrs. Miller and everyone else in town take on long, narrow, funhouse-mirror shapes.) Leonard Cohen's songs haunt the film, reflecting both its beauty and its pessimism.
Now, I can tell you that Canby, the original reviewer, was dead on about the profoundly dated music. But it is a truly beautiful movie, sweet and naturally tragic in its examination of enterprise and romance in a backdrop of mud and squalor. It had precedents, I'm sure, although I can't think of any as energetically vivid or dismal. Altman does exploit fine performances from both Beatty and Christie, although somehow the ordinarily fine Rene Auberjonois seems to caper unfortunately without much depth or character in a role that sorely needed it. (One expects him to burst out with a pirate's "arrrh!" without warning and brandish a parrot.)
Back to how people think changes. In 1971, the Times thought this movie unremarkable. 20+ years later, they raved. Ultimately, they decided it was one of the best 1,000 movies ever made. Certainly, I can see that it's historic; dank and compelling, interiors so perfectly stitched to exteriors that the place becomes perfectly evoked. TV had stolen easy drama; movies responded with profane reality and grim narrative that TV would shun for another 20 years, when HBO took up the charge. That was a moment worth reliving for me.
