The Player ***** (1992, Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Peter Gallagher, Vincent D’Onofrio) – Classic Movie Review 2122

Cult favourite director Robert Altman’s 1992 Hollywood-insiders’ comedy thriller and satire on the film industry is one of his smartest, most celebrated movies. It is an all-knowing, lovingly-made movie, delightfully light-hearted and thoroughly entertaining with its many film references and Hollywood insider jokes. Altman stated: ‘It is a very mild satire, offending no one.’

The Player was an acclaimed comeback to making films in Hollywood for Altman, who went on to an epic adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short stories, Short Cuts (1993).

Tim Robbins stars as Griffin Mill, a young hotshot film studio executive, who is being sent death threats by an unknown aspiring writer whose call he has apparently failed to return. He traces the death-threat postcards to David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio), whose girlfriend June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi) tells him where to find him. After he murders the writer in a parking lot brawl, Griffin starts a romance with June, and then gets more death threats while plotting a rival’s downfall at the studio.

Deploying his huge ensemble cast and handling several subplots with aplomb, Altman relishes filming exuberantly and in long takes in a 90s refinement on his best 70s style.

He seems to rejoice in making none too startling but agreeably waspish points about Hollywood, and sending up lots of Hollywood greats from Jack Lemmon to Burt Reynolds, via Harry Belafonte, Karen Black, Gary Busey, Robert Carradine, Cher, James Coburn, John Cusack, Brad Davis, Jeff Goldblum, Elliott Gould, Anjelica Huston, Andie MacDowell, Nick Nolte, Julia Roberts, Mimi Rogers, Susan Sarandon, Rod Steiger, Lily Tomlin, Ray Walston, Patrick Swayze, Robert Wagner and Bruce Willis, all appearing as themselves.

This is one heck of a multiple cameo movie!  Around 60 Hollywood celebrities agreed to make cameo appearances in the film.

Robbins and Scacchi do very well in the star roles, but the best players to look to for laughs are the ones inhabiting the film’s middle-sized roles, like Whoopi Goldberg as Detective Avery, the unlikely Pasadena policewoman who suspects Robbins’s Griffin Mill of murder.

Both the movie’s atmosphere and screenwriter Michael Tolkin’s storyline (based on his 1988 novel) have an air of total unreality, but of course, ironically, the big joke is that’s probably true to real life in Hollywood.

Also in the cast are Fred Ward, Peter Gallagher, Brion James, Cynthia Stevenson, Dean Stockwell, Richard E Grant, Dina Merrill, Sydney Pollack, Lyle Lovett, Randall Batinkoff and Gina Gershon.

Altman’s brio opening sequence shot lasts seven minutes and 47 seconds without a single camera break. Fifteen takes were required to shoot the scene.

Altman won the BAFTA and Cannes Film Festival Best Director awards and he was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe as Best Director. The film won the Golden Globe for best comedy or musical. Tolkin was nominated for a Screenwriting Academy Award, and he received an Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay. Geraldine Peroni was nominated for the Academy Award for Film Editing. Robbins won the Golden Globe for best actor in a comedy or musical and the Best Actor at Cannes.

It was the year of Hollywood satires, released in the same year as In the Soup (1992) and Mistress (1992).

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2122

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