"The Player" - Film Review

 The Player starts off with a tracking shot, a long take that’s incredibly tricky to pull off. The scene clocks in at 7 minutes and 47 seconds without a single cut; it’s an impressive and memorable sequence that establishes what the film is all about: a satirical hyper-meta film about movies and the film industry.

Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is a writer’s executive for a major unnamed film studio. His job is endangered by up and coming Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher). If this weren’t enough, David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio), a screenwriter whose story he dismissed, keeps sending him postcards threatening to kill him. He goes to confront Kahane to get him to stop, but this only causes things in Mill’s life to spiral even further.  

The film has a twisted, sardonic, self-aware sense of humor, undercutting conventions or lovingly buying into them to dark or cynical effect. The film is thoroughly immersed in references to cinema and it uses these references to pay homage and to make commentaries on its own structure. When a dead screenwriter begins to figuratively haunt protagonist Mill from the dead, a poster for the film Laura is framed soon after in the background of one of the shots. Laura is an Alfred Hitchcock film about a dead wife’s lingering presence causing trouble for all the people still alive from her life. When Kahane harasses him, he calls into the office with the name of Sunset Boulevard’s doomed protagonist Joe Gillis to tease the imminent demise he seeks to bring upon Mill. Besides these more subtle references, there’s an abundance of cameos from notable Hollywood actors too long to count; a fair number of whom lightly mock their established public personas (including an amusing appearance of Julia Roberts as herself in a fake film and Malcolm MacDowell angrily scowling at Mill for no seeming reason other than star based egotism). 

Director Altman had never been a fan of the Hollywood studios. He had made politically bent films in the past (i.e. M*A*S*H* and Nashville) and purposefully went out of his way to challenge his audience’s viewing experience (he would record actors talking over eachother to make it more naturalistic as well as more difficult to follow). Here in The Player, the film studios are stripped bare before us, depicted as shallow, callous, selfish, greedy entities who have no interest in making “films as art” (as Mill so eagerly, falsely lies to us about in a speech at one point). 

The film has a Jackson Pollock like energy to it, and like many of Robert Altman’s previous films it features a collage-like quality of strung together vignettes and smaller incidences that carry a larger narrative. Altman establishes peculiar personalities and interesting scenarios, but he lets his stories meander and wander, emphasizing character work more often than plot.

The Player deftly handles its satire (as well as its homages and meta commentary) whilst managing to tell an intriguing story of its own. It’s populated with extensive, talented casts; none of whom, besides a sweaty, crazy-eyed Tim Robbins, dominates the film but instead are given small, well-observed scenes. This is a very funny film that uses satire to imaginative, smart, and hilarious effect. 

Grade: A-