The Long Goodbye (1973, Robert Altman) (Patreon)

Second viewing, last seen December 2002 (right before I started rating older films). Without a review or any notes to consult, I'd assumed that my "problem" (relative to the retroactive consensus that it's a masterpiece; opinions were pretty sharply divided upon release) mostly involved accepting Gould as Marlowe, so this time I tried pretending that I'd never encountered any prior version of the character. Turns out what I really want is for this magnificently counterintuitive conception of Marlowe not to get embroiled in this frustratingly convoluted, almost cinema-retardant plot*. Been a while since I last saw The Big Sleep, but its nonsensical aspects never bothered me, in part because Bogart's Marlowe always seems to know exactly what's what. This one's adrift, trapped in a world that he never made, which makes Chandler's dense thicket of corruption and betrayal feel like a hat on a hat. To my mind, the film peaks in its opening 20 minutes or so, when Marlowe is just stumbling around trying to feed his finicky cat (greatest animal performance in cinema history?) and chatting with his topless neighbors (who I now belatedly realize inspired one small element of Under the Silver Lake); even the way that he mumbles to himself is inspired, the torrent of casual observations blatantly ADR'd so that they serve as a sonic equivalent of traditional hard-boiled narration, minus any pretense of exposition or macho posturing. This in turn helps make the ending such a titanic jolt to the cranium. In fact, I can't think offhand of another movie that begins and ends this perfectly, but that I nonetheless don't love because much of what's in between feels comparatively kinda blah. And call it heresy, but I sense that Altman (who didn't initiate this project) was very much aware of the narrative sluggishness. Hence e.g. that stunning reflection of Marlowe walking the beach superimposed over Eileen and Roger Wade indoors, which helps distract from a tedious argument but doesn't serve a thematic purpose or visually represent an emotional state. (Feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong. No doubt folks have hypotheses.) Every scene pitting this laid-back, befuddled incarnation of Marlowe against traditional genre heavies plays like...well, like Lebowski without the jokes, which makes me wish I hadn't chosen to make my previous reference to that film a footnote but I'm not gonna try to squeeze it back in now. Bottom line: Altman and Gould try hard to break free of Chandler's novel but ultimately don't succeed enough to fully win my heart. I do very much admire the effort, though.

* Note that I'm likewise semi-cool on The Big Lebowski, which kinda falls apart for me in its second half. Maybe I just can't roll with a deliberate disjunction between narrative and personality. Though in Lebowski it's really more that the jokes get way less funny to me as it goes along.