Take 16: McCabe & Mrs Miller
In July, 2015, the BBC released a list of the 100 Greatest American Films, curated by polling critics all over the world. I’m watching them and writing about them as a form of self taught film school. This week, in honor of the year we want to forget, we’re doing number 16: McCabe & Mrs Miller. — directed by Robert Altman. As always, there will be spoilers.
I was unprepared for the number of Westerns on this list. It was obviously naive of me to underestimate the number of Westerns on a list of the 100 greatest American films, especially considering that it was The Wild Bunch which inspired this project. There is one Western ranked higher than Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller on this list, and that is John Ford’s The Searchers. These two films have very little in common, and yet they inhabit the same genre, and both contribute to American filmmakers fascination with the great frontier.
There are many appealing reasons to gravitate toward this phase of the American origin story. It can be used to exemplify some of our most dearly held self perceptions — an American man can wander into a vast expanse, build a fortune from nothing, assert moralistic superiority, uphold (self determined) justice, enact ritual revenge, and always chase the allure of the unknown. It also provides the perfect playground for our most excitable tendencies, individualism is rewarded and violence is expected. The freedom and terror experienced in the West is exhilarating, the risk / reward scenarios are endlessly tantalizing. It’s no wonder that contemporary cinema continues to return to this particular genre to examine these themes from new and unusual vantage points, twisting with each passing decade to reflect the new American psyche that emerged from the last. The themes of Westerns have seen myriad iterations and refinement over their long history, and as a 30 something lover of film, I can only imagine how many variations on that theme I will see over the course of my life.
Roger Ebert says that this is a perfect movie, and Pauline Kael also lauds the highest praises on to the film. They both describe the sensorial sensation that Altman crafts using his signature multitrack recording techniques, along with rich, sodden, visuals, that place the viewer right in the room. It is the cinematic equivalent of immersive, non- linear theater, where you are integrated into the story instead of watching from behind the fourth wall. Kael goes into detail on how sensory the experience is, and how the combination of the droning overlapping voices, incessant precipitation, and nonchalant treatment of the story arc lulls the viewer into an experience that is at once passive and more involved in each moment of the film. We don’t need large climaxes or exposition because we are so integral to the daily flow of events that we move with currents of the action and pacing, it creates an experience eerily similar to the sensation of ASMR.
Traces of this style have lingered in our modern interpretation of the Western mystique. Our current spate of directorial auteres, Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarrantino, the Coen Brothers (twice), have all added contributions to the pool of American frontier movies. There were moments while watching McCabe & Mrs. Miller that my mind flashed to each of the contemporary films — to their moody interiors or boisterous collisions of rosy cheeked rogues. Altman’s fingerprints are all over modern cinema, but especially in instances where character development supersedes plot provocations and the viewer is invested more in who they’re watching than what is going to happen.
There are some drawbacks to this approach. At times I felt disconnected from the experience, eager for Altman to turn up the heat to keep my interest. Some of this can be blamed on my millennial rearing, and subsequent lack of attention span, but some of it is by design. As McCabe and Mrs. Miller grow to know each other better, and Presbyterian Church solidifies roots, the comforting dullness of the same old saloon and whorehouse, leads to a dull, comfortable, complacency in the setting, one that provoked a half hearted restlessness.
For much of the film, the characters are battling the weather and small local squabbles. The benefit of this approach is that the viewer has a subtle time table to reference for how much time has passed between scenes. In addition to the moodiness the weather establishes, it also creates a common force in the lives of the settlers that bonds them and forces them into tight quarters. For all the wide expanse of the untamed American landscape, the residents of Presbyterian Church must cohabitate in small, dank, rooms.
When the second act folds over, and we’re finally given the little kick in the plot we think we want, we’re caught like McCabe himself, in over our heads. When McCabe was approached by some lawyers requesting a buyout, I didn’t think his flat out refusal and price gouging was that far out of line. Apparently, my assessment was tainted by 2020 sensibilities as Mrs. Miller, now firmly established as McCabe’s paid lover, frets over his fate. McCabe, like some of the audience at a minimum, seems surprised by her concern, and seemingly disheartened by her lack of faith in him.
This scene sums up McCabe perfectly, he rolled into town, was mistaken for Pudgey McCabe (the guy with a big rep who killed someone) and attempts to operate within a dubious mystique. There are some who cow to his posturing, and others who see through the paper thin exterior. Mrs. Miller is the first to identify that McCabe might be mostly talk and convinces him to take her on as a partner — a boon to them both. When she enables him to succeed enough in the settlement that he is offered a buyout, his ego is inflated once again, and the old habit of over betting on himself comes back to haunt him.
The rain and snow is unceasing until Butler, the hired gun comes to kill off McCabe. At this point, the direst threat shifts to the most intimidating man in town and his two cronies. Everything about this man conveys that he is the real deal, who can fill out the long barrel of his rifle. McCabe tries to make a bargain, but Butler doesn’t make deals, and immediately Butler knows that this McCabe can’t be responsible for the death of any man. One of the first things we hear from Butler is that you can kill a Chinese person and the most retribution you can expect is a $50 fine. This ruthlessness cuts again, and most disturbingly, when the affable young cowboy, played by Keith Carradine, is coerced into a shoot out with one Butler’s cronies, the Kid. This scene is one of the most memorable from the film, and an apt microcosm for McCabe and Butler.
The cowboy rolls in after hearing how great the whorehouse is, and has the night of his life before trying to cross the suspension bridge on his way home. The kid is on the other side of the bridge, sizes up the cowboy, and questions why he is carrying a gun. The Cowboy is being called out for presenting an image that he cannot support — and even though he immediately cops to being unable to hit anything he shoots it — the Kid will make him pay for his vulnerability. The ruthless reality of absolute freedom will ultimately result in the death of the both of the likeable young men who came to Prebestyrian Church to fulfill their respective frontier fantasies.
When McCabe is hunted down by Butler and his two sidekicks, he does kill two of the men before finally finding himself shot dead, slumped in the blanketing, oppressive snow. All of this occurs while the rest of the town is heavily invested in putting out a fire that sprung up at the church. The scene presents the viewer with two contrasting streams of thought — a community bands together to save a symbol of their existence and very likely, their livelihood. Meanwhile, McCabe is alone, hunted by a man who has carved his own path to fortune in the new world. Mrs. Miller, throughout all of this, is in a Chinatown opium den.
She is glassy eyed and resigned, indifferent to the snow or McCabe dying outside. Conveying a message of apathy, she succumbs to the listless, hazy, tide of the opiate. She sheds no tears for McCabe, although it’s safe to assume she has guessed his fate, and allows the colors and sounds of her surroundings to blur her senses, accepting her existence in the moment as the random fate of chance that it is, and in those few seconds Altman masterfully shows us a reflection of our own experience of the film as a viewer.
