Robert Altman, who turns 81 tomorrow, will receive his very first Oscar in a couple of weeks: an honorary one, of the sort the academy so often employs to ease the bitterness of a veteran nonwinner's declining years. (And, of course, to square historical accounts and deflect the outrage of future generations of movie lovers, who might feel that the failure to honor an important filmmaker reflects sort of poorly on the awards' credibility.) Like King Vidor, who had to hang in for 85 years to cop a thanks-for-the memories statuette, Mr. Altman has five best-director nominations and zero Oscars to show for a long and prolific career, so he pretty emphatically qualifies as overdue. He has been overdue for 30 years.
Hollywood has in fact never known quite what to make of Mr. Altman, who seemed to come out of nowhere with "M*A*S*H" in 1970 and, despite the industry's best efforts to send him back there, wouldn't go away. With the kind of weird, inexplicable gambler's instinct he would explore, hilariously, in "California Split" (1974), Mr. Altman parlayed his winnings from "M*A*S*H" — which remains by far the biggest hit of his career — into an exhilarating half-decade run of high-stakes moviemaking: seven pictures in the next five years, of which five are, like "M*A*S*H," at least arguably masterpieces.
Those great films — "M*A*S*H," "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (1971), "The Long Goodbye" (1973), "Thieves Like Us" (1974), "California Split" and "Nashville" (1975) — still look like the core of his achievement: to paraphrase Raymond Carver (whose work Mr. Altman adapted in his 1992 film "Short Cuts"), they are what we talk about when we talk about Robert Altman. That's not to say that the two dozen feature films he has managed to direct in the last 30 years are negligible (though there isn't a power on earth, or beyond, that could persuade me to sit through "Quintet," "Health," "Pr*t-*-Porter" or "The Company" again), or that Mr. Altman's skill has in any way diminished with age: the silky command of "Gosford Park" (2001) is ample proof that it hasn't.
It's just that in the early 70's the conditions were right for Mr. Altman's loose-jointed, intuitive, risk-courting approach to making movies, and the planets over Hollywood haven't aligned themselves in that way since. The wondrous opportunity those years afforded adventurous filmmakers like him was that studio executives, for once in their ignoble history, actually knew that they had no idea what they were doing: a man who could deliver the elusive, mysterious (to them) youth market, as the 45-year-old director of "M*A*S*H" somehow did, became a mighty valuable commodity.
Mr. Altman, who had spent the previous couple of decades directing industrial films, episodic television ("Bonanza," "Combat") and the odd low-budget picture, seized his moment and set about the task of reimagining, with a little help from his friends, how American movies should look and sound and feel. The anti-authoritarian spirit, the caught-on-the-fly dialogue and the invigoratingly original blend of slapstick and casual naturalism that had made "M*A*S*H" seem so new mutated into something even stranger and headier in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" a year later.
That film, a western of an unusually lyrical kind, puts the controlled-chaos techniques of "M*A*S*H" to entirely different use: in "McCabe," the buzzing vitality of the frontier mining settlement called Presbyterian Church serves as counterpoint to an eccentric American tragedy. It's the only movie I know of in which you can watch a community come into existence, changing and growing before your eyes, and Mr. Altman's camera, seeming to catch the whole complex process unawares, is miraculously alert to both the pleasures and the melancholy ironies of growth.
It's among the greatest movies of its time, up there with Sam Peckinpah's "Wild Bunch" (1969) and the first two "Godfather" pictures (1972 and 1974). And like them it's the product of an era in which the nature of the American democratic experiment was being questioned constantly and, in the best of our films, unconventionally celebrated — celebrated, that is, not for our collective military and economic power but for our individual vigor and orneriness and goofy optimism. This was a cultural moment made for Mr. Altman, whose hopeful approach to making movies has always been to get a bunch of lively, interesting-looking actors together and watch what happens, see if they can make something grow.
Mr. Altman had, in the early 70's, assembled an unofficial repertory company around him, a group of performers he trusted to supply the quick jolts of energy — the funky humor and the wayward poignance — his lightning-in-a-bottle moviemaking required. Elliott Gould, Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine, Bert Remsen, John Schuck, Gwen Welles, Michael Murphy and Henry Gibson were, in shifting combinations, the faces of an Altman movie, people who seemed to exist (or, in the case of Mr. Gould, to exist vividly) only in his fictional world. And he gathered them all, along with a few more of their unpredictable ilk, for his epic "Nashville," a movie whose multiple threads of stray narrative are held together by nothing more than a spirit, a sensibility: the weird buoyancy of Mr. Altman's take-it-as-it-comes fatalism.
What strikes you, in fact, when you watch "Nashville" or its three immediate predecessors, "The Long Goodbye," "Thieves Like Us" and "California Split," is how fundamentally grim Mr. Altman's vision of American life is — and how little that persistent, deep-seated, unshakable disillusion actually affects the tone of the movies. All the characters in those pictures are in one way or another disappointed, but disappointment doesn't appear to be a big deal for Mr. Altman. Maybe because he had to wait so long to fulfill his artistic ambitions, because he arrived so late to the Hollywood party, he seems to know (every one of his movies says it) that disappointment never killed anybody. "It's O.K. with me" is the dopey mantra of Mr. Gould's Phillip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye"; the crowd at the end of "Nashville," shocked by an act of sudden violence, gets over its horror by singing along to a tune called "It Don't Worry Me." And although in both pictures the effect is ironic, in neither case is it wholly ironic. On some level, Mr. Altman shrugs along with his characters.
He would need, as it turned out, every bit of that world-weary insouciance in the years that followed "Nashville," when it gradually became clear that the moment for his sort of exploratory filmmaking was passing, and then simply past. His stock company slowly dispersed, his college-age audience grew up and entered the so-called real world (which proved to be rather like the prosperous, company-run town that in the end no longer needs beautiful dreamers like John McCabe), and the studios became, I think it's fair to say, less tolerant of box-office failure.
You could almost feel the air leaking out of Mr. Altman's balloon in the late 70's. And by the 80's this profoundly American filmmaker had moved to Europe and largely reinvented himself as a less ambitious sort of artist: a master craftsman and a miniaturist, not a fresco painter dangling perilously from cathedral ceilings. He found work directing operas, plays and, television dramas, and for the big screen contented himself with a series of filmed theater pieces, most of which involved just one set and a limited number of characters. (The most memorable of them, 1984's "Secret Honor," is a one-man show about Nixon.)
In a way, the Robert Altman of this period is like one of the aging outlaws of "The Wild Bunch": "It ain't like it used to be, but it'll do." And although his 80's movies are less exciting, their very smallness allows you to appreciate the beauty and resourcefulness of Mr. Altman's technique: the slow zooms, the fluid tracking shots, the elegantly timed cuts (usually on movement), the extraordinary assurance with which he explores the confined spaces and controls the dramatic rhythm, are immensely satisfying even when his material is second-rate.
He kept his instrument in tune, and when a terrific script finally came his way — Julian Mitchell's "Vincent & Theo," about the van Gogh brothers — he was more than ready. The movie he made, which was released in 1990 as an art-house picture (and is now available, in a gorgeous transfer, on DVD), seems to me the best of his post-"Nashville" films: moving, powerful, scary and in love with light. Mr. Altman's direction is somber and almost classical, which may partly explain why the picture is so good: he's often at his sharpest when he's doing something he hasn't done before.
The movie that put him, briefly, back on the Hollywood map, though, was familiar territory — the darkly comic ensemble piece "The Player" (1992), whose setting is Hollywood itself and whose rampaging energy seems to derive from the glee of consummating a long-nursed revenge fantasy. "The Player" is his funniest movie, and, in the end, a prime example of the O.K.-with-me attitude that has enabled Mr. Altman to get by, and occasionally thrive, in the funhouse-mirror culture of studio filmmaking.
He seized that moment, too, to try to recapture a bit of the early-70's exuberance. But he couldn't quite locate it, either in "Short Cuts" (which is brilliant but sour-spirited) or in the 1996 "Kansas City" (in which the cast let him down). What got his juices flowing again, peculiarly enough, was the elaborate English murder-mystery trifle "Gosford Park," which revealed, to his evident delight, that there was a whole new world of Altman actors waiting for him in the old world.
If honorary Oscars are to some degree awards for longevity and brute persistence, then Mr. Altman qualifies on that score, too: he's the unlikeliest imaginable survivor of the Hollywood system. When he steps onto the stage of the Kodak Theater on March 5 as this year's distinguished geezer, he might feel a twinge of is-this-all-there-is? disappointment, but his movies tell us that he'll get over it. He might even reflect that Sam Peckinpah — his junior by one day, and 20 years dead — blew out his heart fighting the studios, and never got his vindication. And Robert Altman, I expect, will accept his statuette with (perhaps slightly mordant) good grace, because it'll do.