by Jake Hjort, Contributing Writer
Welcome back, fellow time travelers, to another edition of 20th Century Flicks! This month, in a continued effort to check classic cinema off of my list of shame, I’m diving back to the year 1992 to watch Robert Altman’s The Player. As I carry on with my journey to cover some of Hollywood’s greatest directors, I figured my quest would not be complete without a look-in on Altman, another legendary filmmaker whose work I am largely and tragically unfamiliar with.
The Player focuses on Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), a fictional Hollywood executive who works to green light scripts pitched by prospective writers. When he starts receiving death threats from a disgruntled writer, he takes matters into his own hands and concludes that they have been sent by David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio), a screenwriter he had rejected previously. After an encounter between the two leads to a fight and the death of Kahane, Mill attempts to continue business as usual, while a murder investigation mounts. While skirting the police, Mill begins a relationship with Kahane’s girlfriend June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), and learns that he had killed the wrong writer as death threats continue to arrive. Though pressure mounts, Mill is eventually exonerated when an eyewitness fails to identify him in a lineup, leading to a promotion to studio head as he makes a deal with his threatener.
At its heart, The Player is a dark comedy satirizing Hollywood itself, full of celebrity cameos and well-informed barbs at the art — and business — of filmmaking. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the most well-informed on the movie business of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and I could feel a lot of cameos and references going over my head. That being said, the bits that do land, land really well, such as the horrible pitches read out throughout the film, or the insistence on casting Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts in every project (a joke with an incredible payoff at the end of the film). Although not everything was accessible to me, I can still respect a film that is made to exist in and be a time capsule of the era in which it was made and released, and this film certainly fits that bill.
More than anything else, what impressed me about The Player is Altman’s direction. I don’t believe that I’ve seen any of his works before this one, but I was very impressed by his filmmaking sensibilities, and look forward to seeking out more of his movies in the future. One of my favorite techniques in a director’s tool belt for making a world feel real and authentic is to have characters talk over one another, or to have multiple conversations occurring on screen at the same time. It’s a difficult trick to pull off and not confuse the viewer, but when done well, it’s an excellent reminder that there is a world that exists outside of the main plot of the film, and a great way to get multiple pieces of information or exposition across at the same time. I’ve long considered Steven Spielberg to be the master of this technique, but this may be the most adept utilization of it that I’ve seen.
Another big highlight of The Player is the performances put in by its main cast. Robbins is great in the lead role as the beleaguered film executive, struggling to defend against the writer sending him death threats, while trying to run from the murder he himself committed, while swept up in paranoia. Supporting performances that I particularly enjoy include Whoopi Goldberg as the detective investigating Griffin, Cynthia Stevenson as Griffin’s girlfriend and story editor Bonnie, and D’Onofrio as smarmy writer-turned-murder victim.
If I could levy one complaint against The Player, it’s that it masquerades as a mystery which never fully comes to fruition. Though the hunt to identify the sender of the death threats is certainly integral to the plot, the actual identity is of little importance, and is never actually revealed. Though the film doesn’t need this to be an engaging mystery to tell the story that it wants to tell, I think that it would have been nice to have one with a bit more consequence and an actual reveal with a proper lead-up.
The Player is a film that I went into with absolutely zero expectations for what to feel or expect, and I walked away very impressed. Many of the films that I’ve watched for this column are ones that I’ve heard of before and selected to write about months in advance, but this is one that I simply stumbled upon while scrolling through HBO Max and decided to put on. Watching an iconic film and having it meet lofty expectations is always nice, but to become enamored with a film I’ve never heard of is a special experience, and I’m thankful to Altman for being able to provide that to me.
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