***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Tim Robbins, Greta Sacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg, Sydney Pollack, Vincent D’Onofrio, Dean Stockwell, Richard E. Grant, Lyle Lovett, and Peter Gallagher.
Cameos by Martin Scorsese, Buck Henry, Anjelica Huston, John Cusack, Malcolm MacDowell, Harry Belafonte, and Julia Roberts.
Directed by Robert Altman
1992 R
Robert Altman’s “The Player” functions on three levels: as suspense, in which a despicable yet likable man is sent death threats; as a critique of Hollywood studios, using this man and his plight to take us on an insider tour; and as a critique of how we can all be backstabbers when trying to climb the social ladder, using Hollywood as an example. These three themes are like concentric circles; the deeper you get into the suspense, the deeper you get into Hollywood, then the sooner you get to noticing how their behavior isn’t so abnormal after all.
Griffin Mill (the really tall Tim Robbins) is a studio executive. His job is to read about a hundred scripts a day and pick the ones he thinks the studio will most want to turn into movies. The studio makes twelve movies a year. Mill receives fifty thousand scripts so, naturally, he has to turn—for all intents and purposes—all of them down. An offended writer is now leaving death threats on Mill’s desk and snakes in his car. Mill goes through his files and tracks down a writer (Vincent D’Onofrio) he suspects is sending the threats, then goes to the house shared by the writer and his girlfriend (Greta Sacchi). He doesn’t get very far, exactly, with the writer, but he does become involved in the girlfriend, who never goes to the movies, doesn’t read many books, is mostly unfeeling, and thus fascinating to Mill.
But Mill’s troubles don’t stop with death threats. When D’Onofrio is found murdered the Pasadena P.D. (headed by Whoopi Goldberg) mark him as their prime suspect. Then there’s the creepy guy (a perfectly peculiar Lyle Lovett) in the business suit and tennis shoes who’s waiting for Mill wherever he goes. Then there’s still the matter of Mill’s job, in which a slimy upstart named Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) is trying to muscle him out, and of course he still has to hear and glance over fifty thousand script proposals. He meets endlessly with writers and directors, over every meal and in every minute of the day, and he takes us to the cafes and health spas and bars where deals are made. Even when he wishes he could be alone he is hounded by desperate screenwriters.
Performances in a film like this are crucial. Tim Robbins as Mill is despicable, because he’s greedy and self-serving and cold, but we end up liking him anyway, not just because we see everything from his point of view, but because there’s a kind of reassuring, ordered predictability to his coldness. Since this is a movie about movies, there are dozens of cameos and in-jokes, including an opening shot which lasts unbroken for nine or twelve minutes or something, an obvious parody of Orson Welles’ famous beginning to “Touch of Evil,” in which we are introduced to Mill’s calmly mad world. “The Player” is also a fascinating examination of how movies get made. When most people think of movie-making, they think of hard-working, excited special effects people revealing the secrets of marauding skeletons or angry sharks. Here we see where it all begins, where artistry is crushed in favor of marketing, where writers are frustrated by endless circles of men in suits, where your life’s work has to be summed up in sixty seconds or less.
Maybe why we end up liking Mill is because he may torment writers, but he doesn’t hate them. He genuinely enjoys the movies, and he does feel sorry for all those good, offbeat stories that can’t be filmed. His competitor Levy actually proposes that the studios remove writers from the process entirely and just have executives make up stuff from newspapers. Mill comes to writers’ defense. “The Player” is that kind of peculiar, unconventional film that Mill wishes he could make, and it stands head and shoulders above most of the formula junk that Levy would rather make.
Copyright 2002 Friday & Saturday Night