I'm not convinced that this film is not more well-respected just because director Robert Altman's name is attached. Show Kansas City to your average casual film-viewer without letting them know who directed, or you can even let them know, if they're not cineastes and do not know Altman, and I think the average opinion would be much lower. That's not to say there are no positive qualities to the film, but it is far more burdened with flaws, and it's more likely to ultimately annoy rather than entertain.
The story is of course set in Kansas City, during the depression. Blondie O'Hara (Jennifer Jason Leigh) enters the home of socialite Carolyn Stilton (Miranda Richardson) under false pretenses (she says she's there to give Mrs. Stilton her normal manicure) and ends up pulling a gun on her. Mrs. Stilton figures it's just your run-of-the-mill robbery, but O'Hara wants something else. O'Hara's husband, Johnny (Dermot Mulroney), has gotten himself into trouble and Mrs. Stilton's influential husband, Henry (Michael Murphy), an adviser to President Roosevelt, can help him out.
Let me mention the positive aspects of the film first, because otherwise I'll likely run out of room. The primary asset is the film's music. Because of the setting, including that a lot of the film takes place in a black jazz joint, the "Hey Hey Club", the music is jazz during its transitional phase between swing and early bop--heck, even a young Charlie Parker (Albert J. Burnes) is in the film, although the setting has Parker too young to be shown performing (and Parker turns out to be irrelevant to the film). But it does have musicians playing Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Count Basie, and the musicians who perform throughout the film read like all all-star roster of contemporary jazzers, including David Murray, Joshua Redman, David "Fathead" Newman, Ron Carter, Christian McBride, Geri Allen and Victor Lewis. The music is excellent if you're a jazz fan, as Altman must be.
The other asset is that production designer Stephen Altman, the director's son, does an excellent job getting the period setting right. Especially if you're into classic cars of the era, the film will be a treat to watch, but all of the details seem right. The cinematography isn't bad, either.
However, even as good as the music is, it just doesn't work within the context of the film. Most of the musicians can't act but try to. Maybe it's that they weren't directed very well by Altman. He features them on camera too much, and even lingers on them for relatively long songs. A concert film featuring the band would have been great. In the middle of a dramatic film, these shots just feel like padding with bad acting.
The story itself, although relatively simple--too simple, perhaps, is chopped up and told as if it's going to have some big revelation or twist. Altman keeps unnecessarily jumping back and forth in time--but just a few hours, and he keeps unnecessarily jumping back and forth between different sets of characters in the middle of (very) long scenes. I guess he realized the scenes were too long and needed to be broken up. The scenes should have been cut back instead. More should have happened. Far too often, scenes feel like they're stretched out with pointless dialogue just to increase the film's running time.
And the dialogue isn't just pointless. It's loaded with non-sequiturs. I've never experienced laudanum or known anyone who has, but one of the characters, shown as a laudanum user, regularly speaks gibberish. At least that seems to be the excuse for it. It turns out that everyone in the film routinely speaks gibberish as if they're on some kind of heavy drugs. Not every line is like that, but enough are that it's relatively inexplicable. The plot in general has a lot of non-sequiturs. It seems almost as if Altman, who co-wrote the script with Frank Barhydt, was shooting for some kind of bizarre surrealism, except that surrealism seems so out of context for the setting and basic gist of the film, and it's too understated to seem intentional. I just don't get why people in the film would speak and behave so oddly.
Then there are the performances. I've liked Jennifer Jason Leigh in some films--I absolutely love eXistenZ (1999) for example, and she certainly can act like "someone other than herself", which a lot of people seem to use as one of the main criteria for "good acting", but her character here is so annoying that I couldn't wait for the film to be over. She bizarrely barks out her dialogue in a grating accent. When I thought of it upon waking up this morning with my review gelling in my head (I usually watch films at night then think about them while I head off to sleep--reviews often pop up almost fully formed when I awake), I burst out laughing remembering the character. It's something I'd more expect from an alien sketch on a show like MadTV or Saturday Night Live. Imagine Prymatt Conehead with a sour and somewhat hyper Brooklyn attitude.
Harry Belafonte, as the ridiculously named "Seldom Seen", also tended to be annoying--and he probably has more lines than anyone else but Leigh. A number of other characters were primarily annoying, too. The only one I really didn't mind was Miranda Richardson, despite the gibberish, and she's also gorgeous, so she's a treat to watch.
There are a couple good sequences, but they tended to be those focused on "action"--when characters were up and about, doing something rather than sitting in a room and talking, and the climax was great (I even cheered). Unfortunately, those sequences were few and far between. The majority of the film just seems flat and drawn out. My advice is to just buy the soundtrack; avoid the film.
The story is of course set in Kansas City, during the depression. Blondie O'Hara (Jennifer Jason Leigh) enters the home of socialite Carolyn Stilton (Miranda Richardson) under false pretenses (she says she's there to give Mrs. Stilton her normal manicure) and ends up pulling a gun on her. Mrs. Stilton figures it's just your run-of-the-mill robbery, but O'Hara wants something else. O'Hara's husband, Johnny (Dermot Mulroney), has gotten himself into trouble and Mrs. Stilton's influential husband, Henry (Michael Murphy), an adviser to President Roosevelt, can help him out.
Let me mention the positive aspects of the film first, because otherwise I'll likely run out of room. The primary asset is the film's music. Because of the setting, including that a lot of the film takes place in a black jazz joint, the "Hey Hey Club", the music is jazz during its transitional phase between swing and early bop--heck, even a young Charlie Parker (Albert J. Burnes) is in the film, although the setting has Parker too young to be shown performing (and Parker turns out to be irrelevant to the film). But it does have musicians playing Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Count Basie, and the musicians who perform throughout the film read like all all-star roster of contemporary jazzers, including David Murray, Joshua Redman, David "Fathead" Newman, Ron Carter, Christian McBride, Geri Allen and Victor Lewis. The music is excellent if you're a jazz fan, as Altman must be.
The other asset is that production designer Stephen Altman, the director's son, does an excellent job getting the period setting right. Especially if you're into classic cars of the era, the film will be a treat to watch, but all of the details seem right. The cinematography isn't bad, either.
However, even as good as the music is, it just doesn't work within the context of the film. Most of the musicians can't act but try to. Maybe it's that they weren't directed very well by Altman. He features them on camera too much, and even lingers on them for relatively long songs. A concert film featuring the band would have been great. In the middle of a dramatic film, these shots just feel like padding with bad acting.
The story itself, although relatively simple--too simple, perhaps, is chopped up and told as if it's going to have some big revelation or twist. Altman keeps unnecessarily jumping back and forth in time--but just a few hours, and he keeps unnecessarily jumping back and forth between different sets of characters in the middle of (very) long scenes. I guess he realized the scenes were too long and needed to be broken up. The scenes should have been cut back instead. More should have happened. Far too often, scenes feel like they're stretched out with pointless dialogue just to increase the film's running time.
And the dialogue isn't just pointless. It's loaded with non-sequiturs. I've never experienced laudanum or known anyone who has, but one of the characters, shown as a laudanum user, regularly speaks gibberish. At least that seems to be the excuse for it. It turns out that everyone in the film routinely speaks gibberish as if they're on some kind of heavy drugs. Not every line is like that, but enough are that it's relatively inexplicable. The plot in general has a lot of non-sequiturs. It seems almost as if Altman, who co-wrote the script with Frank Barhydt, was shooting for some kind of bizarre surrealism, except that surrealism seems so out of context for the setting and basic gist of the film, and it's too understated to seem intentional. I just don't get why people in the film would speak and behave so oddly.
Then there are the performances. I've liked Jennifer Jason Leigh in some films--I absolutely love eXistenZ (1999) for example, and she certainly can act like "someone other than herself", which a lot of people seem to use as one of the main criteria for "good acting", but her character here is so annoying that I couldn't wait for the film to be over. She bizarrely barks out her dialogue in a grating accent. When I thought of it upon waking up this morning with my review gelling in my head (I usually watch films at night then think about them while I head off to sleep--reviews often pop up almost fully formed when I awake), I burst out laughing remembering the character. It's something I'd more expect from an alien sketch on a show like MadTV or Saturday Night Live. Imagine Prymatt Conehead with a sour and somewhat hyper Brooklyn attitude.
Harry Belafonte, as the ridiculously named "Seldom Seen", also tended to be annoying--and he probably has more lines than anyone else but Leigh. A number of other characters were primarily annoying, too. The only one I really didn't mind was Miranda Richardson, despite the gibberish, and she's also gorgeous, so she's a treat to watch.
There are a couple good sequences, but they tended to be those focused on "action"--when characters were up and about, doing something rather than sitting in a room and talking, and the climax was great (I even cheered). Unfortunately, those sequences were few and far between. The majority of the film just seems flat and drawn out. My advice is to just buy the soundtrack; avoid the film.