(2 of 5)
The Player is both very good and a quintessential Altman movie -- meaning smart, hip, satirical, charming, ironic but not callow, rich with telling offhand incident. "What's unique about The Player," says Trudeau, "is that he brings all this signature observational detail to a picture that Hollywood completely understands. In many ways it's a very traditional Hollywood movie, but he's given up nothing. That's why people are so astonished." It is, in a word, crypto-conventional, self-consciously including all the obligatory elements of commercial moviemaking -- stars, violence, unclothed women, lockstep plotting -- but messing with them. The really big stars parody themselves; the sex is not very sexy.
The film's clean, hard edge and people-playing-themselves verisimilitude come, Altman says, from his collaboration with Trudeau. Without Tanner, Altman says, "I don't think I could have made this film." It probably also helped that he stopped drinking, though Altman bridles at the suggestion. "I stopped drinking for health reasons. I've never jeopardized anything by either the drinking or the gambling" -- he plays poker, backgammon and the horses -- "or the pot smoking. I do smoke pot. I sit on the front porch like a grandpa and try to enjoy the weather."
The reflexive knock against The Player is that its satire is too inside. In the opening scene, for instance, the studio executive played by Tim Robbins sits listening to a series of real-life screenwriters pitching plausibly dopey movie ideas -- among them Buck Henry, who co-wrote The Graduate, proposing a ridiculous Graduate sequel. Michael Tolkin, who wrote the screenplay and the 1988 novel on which The Player is based, also appears in the film as a screenwriter. But all the in-jokes are a secondary pleasure, not the essence. Even if you don't know what turnaround means, The Player is a satisfying thriller -- and besides, after reading magazines like Vanity Fair and ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY and watching shows like Entertainment Tonight, ordinary moviegoers are surprisingly fluent in the nuts and bolts of show business. Indeed, ET's Leeza Gibbons appears in The Player as her chirpy self, delivering lines written at Altman's behest by a real ET writer. "Why should I try to imitate somebody who does that?" explains the director. "I mean, he writes it as bad as it's going to be written."
The movie makes knowing fun of all sorts of Hollywood types, but the satire never seems heartless. "Everything that's in there that's mean is about me," Altman says. "I mean, I talk like those guys. I get on the phone and I make those pitches the same way. I cannot tell you how many times I've said ((about a proposed film)), 'Well, it's kind of like Nashville, it's a Nashville kind of structure.' The film does not escape its own satire. We didn't let anybody off the hook."