NP1 Review: The Player

Appreciate This: The Player

Here's a little-known movie that came out ten years ago. I'd never heard of it until we watched it in class, and it turned out to be a pleasant surprise. If you ever see it listed on TV or something, you might want to take a look.

There have been many films made about the movie industry over the past hundred years. Some have been entertaining and fun, like Singin' in the Rain, and others have been technically sound, such as Day for Night. One film that has managed to combine these two schools and produce an entertaining film that gives us a glimpse into the business of filmmaking is Robert Altman's The Player. It provides a great mystery while also providing an insider's look at Hollywood, the movie business, and the people in it.

Tim Robbins plays Griffin Mill, a producer for a Hollywood motion picture studio. He listens to pitches all day from screenwriters, and turns quite a few of them down. Griffin is a suave businessman, like just about every producer encountered in the film, and is in essence, "the player" of the film's title. He is friendly and courteous most of the time, cutthroat and aggressive when he has to be, knows what to say and when to say it, and knows a thing or two about women. Over the course of the film, we'll see him make deals, plot against his rivals, murder a man, and have an affair with the girlfriend of the man he killed.

Griffin begins to receive threatening postcards in the mail, and eventually believes he's found the culprit in David Kahane, a screenwriter he rejected a few months earlier. After speaking with the writer's girlfriend, June, he meets Kahane in a movie theater. After having drinks together, they have a fight in the parking lot and Griffin accidentally kills him. After trying to cover it up, he comes into work the next day and finds that Kahane was not the man sending the postcards and that a rival is also moving in on his job.

Sure, this is a great plot to a mystery, but it's only part of the context of The Player. As Griffin later explains to June, the ideal Hollywood movie consists of sex, violence, and a happy ending, among other things. This plot has the potential to lead up to all of these things, and it does, more or less. It's the way we get there and the reaction of the viewer that determines Griffin's real fate.

Griffin gets away with the crime in the end, and due to his aggressive lifestyle, he becomes head of the studio. He has dumped his ex-girlfriend in favor of June, leaves her on the steps of the office in tears without even a glance, and heads home in his new, very expensive convertible. Depending on what type of person you are, you might find this to be a great story of determination or an example of how corruption can lead you into a dishonorable existence. For a real-life "player" like Griffin, this would be a marvelous story. However, the rest of us probably see him as a sellout.

Mike Tolkin, who adapted the screenplay for The Player from his novel of the same name, created this story with the intent of putting forth an entertaining plotline while also creating an opportunity to satire. As Griffin might say, this story is sure to be taken up by a Hollywood producer because it offers up the potential for success. Robert Altman took advantage of the chance to satire and turned the film into something of his own.

The Player is my first exposure to Altman's work. I had seen some of the motion picture version of M*A*S*H* when I was younger, but I don't recall much of it now, other than the fact that Elliot Gould was in it instead of Alan Alda. Since seeing this film, I have read up on his style of direction and have picked up on some of his different traits. One of these is his ability to use satire as a device in the film. Here, he exploits Los Angeles and its "image" it has put forth, the people who live and work there, and the film industry itself. He shows us the Los Angeles that the entertainment world created for itself and tries to maintain; the LA of beautiful people, expensive cars, expensive clothing, et cetera. The LA where you can see Jeff Goldblum and Harry Belafonte at the same party, Burt Reynolds at lunch, and Andie MacDowell at a club all in the same day. Perhaps most importantly of all, Altman shows us the business of filmmaking, a world of making money rather than art.

Another device of Altman's is his ability to use dialogue in a very realistic manner. Several times in The Player, you will see and hear overlapping conversations. At times, these conversations can seem to blend together, and at others, they can interfere. Altman knows when to make the dialogue flow together so that you can follow two or three different conversations at once, or just make it seem like you are trying in vain to listen to three clashing arguments.

Another common trait among Altman's films is the amount of star power they carry. Being well-liked by many people in Hollywood, he is able to score many cameos for his films, including this one. While it's a lot of fun to keep track of different stars that appear briefly throughout The Player (Angelica Huston, John Cusack, Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, Peter Faulk, Susan Sarandon, among others) it's also slightly confusing the first time through. For example, the first time Whoopi Goldberg appeared on camera, I thought she was doing a cameo. However, in a moment, it was established that she was playing the detective who was investigating the murder. Even more confusing was Lyle Lovett's role. I found myself wondering why Lyle Lovett would be following Griffin around. I actually thought that he might be the man sending the postcards after a while, and still be Lyle Lovett. Instead, he turned out to be another detective. Still, I thought that the notion of being followed by Lyle Lovett was at once very funny and slightly disturbing.

This film is basically a tribute to filmmaking, but it's more than that. It's almost a morality play, in which just about every virtuous character ends up selling out. For instance, the director dead set on making Habeas Corpus (the film within the film) a serious, no-star, no-happy-ending film ends up changing the cast and ending to make more money. In the end it's Bonnie, Griffin's original love interest, who keeps her dignity, and she ends up being the "loser" in this movie.

That's not to say that it's a bad film with a bad message. The Player might be cynical in some aspects, but it's all in good fun. Chances are, a studio wouldn't release a film that implied that producers do such dastardly things, let alone get away with them. After all, this is Hollywood, and this is the movies.

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