The Player

The Player is an insider's movie about Hollywood, but from the outside looking in: it's Altman through the looking glass. From its brilliant and sublime opening sequence to its self-reflexive ending, The Player distills everything that's wrong with the American film industry with the precision of someone who's been there. It's no small irony that the film has revitalized the career of Altman, one of the American cinema's great mavericks who dropped out of mainstream filmmaking, an uncompromising artist whose nemesis is personified as The Player. Although some might characterize this movie as Altman's revenge on the town that done him wrong, it's much too sly to be so obvious. (Predictably, the always literal Hollywood thinks otherwise. The major studios' frantic bidding war to distribute this independent feature, after initially refusing to finance it, is a sad commentary on how the industry tries to make amends for its transgressions.) At the center of Michael Tolkin's script (based on his novel) is the story of a desperate, soulless film producer (smoothly played by the baby-faced Robbins) who accidentally murders a disgruntled screenwriter whom he believes has been sending him threatening postcards. But it's the periphery of the movie where the action is: scripts are pitched by hungry screenwriters in terms of other movie (“It's Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate”); projects are dream-cast with the latest box-office draw (the ubiquitous Julia Roberts is everyone's choice for any female role); cliches are uttered like mantras (“Call me in the morning”); deals are made with the faux sincerity that comes with having to watch your back all the time; and happy endings are a must. Because the world of The Player is one seemingly on the fringe of reality, Altman has recruited a slew of actors and actresses to play themselves -- look, there's Lily Tomlin in a bad detective movie, Cher and Nick Nolte at a fund raising event that hypocritically touts the movies as art, Jack Lemmon playing the piano at a party. As cynically funny as any movie made about Hollywood, The Player is all too welcome, not only because it marks the return of Altman in top form, but also because it expresses a dissatisfaction with the state of the American movie without preaching. Indeed, there may be a lot of things wrong with Hollywood today -- too impersonal, blockbuster-obsessed, overly formulaic, and hostile to creativity and originality -- but The Player isn't one of them.