Movie Reviews : Robert Altman Finds His Way to Carverville : ‘Short Cuts’ daringly expands Raymond Carver’s blue-collar world while remaining true to the spirit that animated it.

The old lion can still roar.

Though tradition holds that there are no second acts in American lives, writer-director Robert Altman, never much of a traditionalist, embarks with “Short Cuts” (Cineplex Odeon Century Plaza) on the fourth or possibly fifth act of a remarkable career. Both building on what has gone before and extending outward to new boundaries, he has made a rich, unnerving film, as comic as it is astringent, that in its own quiet way works up a considerable emotional charge.

Altman is 68 now, a survivor of successes like “M*A*S*H,” “Nashville,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” and last year’s “The Player” as well as failures best not mentioned. Yet he still wants it all, still pushes his vision of film as a medium capable of supplying the widest psychological canvas on which to illustrate the way we live now.

Altman’s co-conspirator this time around is the late Raymond Carver, a groundbreaking short-story writer who called himself a paid-up-in-full member of the working poor and made his considerable reputation with beautifully compressed, unadorned tales of life among the blue-collar classes.

Though this might seem too narrow and specific a base for Altman’s ambitions, he and co-screenwriter Frank Barhydt understand that the harder you look at even the most ordinary lives, the more you see. Basing their script on nine of Carver’s stories plus a prose poem, they have fashioned a three-hour-plus chamber piece for 22 players, a beautiful and intricate mosaic of character and incident that examines the greatest of all mysteries, that of ordinary reality.

In a season that is rife with prestigious literary adaptations, with everything from “The Age of Innocence” to the forthcoming “Remains of the Day” being carefully brought to the screen, “Short Cuts” is the most daring and inventive as Altman, in his own words, “made Carver soup” out of his source material.

Set in the Pacific Northwest, Carver’s tales deal with lives that have not developed as planned and with people who are trying to figure existence out, to make it work with the puny tools they have at hand. “This life is not easy, any way you cut it,” says one character, while another echoes, “It ain’t going to do no good. Whatever you do, it ain’t going to help none.” Carver’s great gift is that without resorting to patronizing or romanticizing or special pleading he tunes us into the souls of people who sometimes don’t even recognize how desperate they’ve become.

What Altman and co-writer Barhydt have done to these stories is more than merely move the locale to the Los Angeles area, more in fact than most adapters dare to do. They have used Carver’s stories as source material, not text; a jumping-off point, not a blueprint. Changing situations and relationships, combining characters, inventing new ones and fiddling with social class, they have expanded Carver’s world while remaining true to the spirit that animated it.

They have also, in a way anyone familiar with “Nashville” will recognize immediately, constructed a spider’s web of interconnections between the 22 protagonists. If not either relatives or friends, characters pass one another on the street or share space in stores and coffee shops. These connections never feel arbitrary or contrived, but rather come across as enriching elements, deepening the involvement of the story.

“Short Cuts” begins on a night of anti-Medfly spraying in Southern California with a series of brief character introductions. After dispensing his malathion, helicopter pilot Stormy Weathers (Peter Gallagher) unsuccessfully attempts to sweet-talk his estranged wife Betty (Frances McDormand). TV commentator Howard Finnigan (Bruce Davison) has some pithy things to say about that spray, but his wife Ann (Andie MacDowell) is more concerned with their fragile son. Harried mom Sherri Shepard (Madeleine Stowe) wants to bring her dog Suzie inside while her unsympathetic husband Gene (Tim Robbins) screams, “Don’t you get environmental on me.” And Jerry Kaiser (Chris Penn) puts a tarp on his Cool Pool Service truck as his wife Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh) coolly conducts her phone-sex business while diapering one of their children.

In other parts of town, Marian Wyman (Julianne Moore) and her husband Ralph (Matthew Modine) strike up a conversation with seatmates Claire and Stuart Kane (Anne Archer and Fred Ward) at a classical concert featuring cellist Zoe Trainer (Lori Singer). Meanwhile Zoe’s mother Tess (Annie Ross) is singing jazz at a club where Honey and Bill Bush (Lili Taylor and Robert Downey Jr.) are meeting some neighbors. And limo driver Earl Piggot (Tom Waits) is winding up a long night by stopping off at the diner where his wife Doreen (Lily Tomlin) works as a waitress.

Complex as this may sound, it is never difficult to follow. It is also the merest beginning, as, on the next day and those following it these stories unfold and glance off each other, with each successive sequence revealing something more about the characters, their relationships and their lives. Aided by a herculean editing job by Geraldine Peroni, all these stories double and triple back on themselves, bringing in new actors like Buck Henry, Jack Lemmon, Huey Lewis and Lyle Lovett, now picking up one strand, now another, in a way that is both mesmerizing and intoxicating.

There are moments of great humor in these stories, especially in Robbins’ performance as a self-important motorcycle cop who is pathologically incapable of telling the truth. But “Short Cuts” is less jokey than “The Player” and much of its comedy is laced with pain, as for instance when Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Lois carries on outrageously obscene phone conversations, oblivious to the discomfort she is causing her husband (a surprisingly affecting performance by Penn).

That pain also stretches into tragedy at times, and what Altman focuses his film on is how his characters cope with the major and minor disturbances of life. “Short Cuts” deals with crossed wires and struggles for dignity, with the difficulty men and women have being in the same room together, let alone communicating, and finally with the way we both torture and heal each other, imperfect people making a curious and imperfect peace.

As with any three-hour film, “Short Cuts” (rated R for graphic sexual language and for nudity) is not equally involving all the time. Some performances are stronger than others, some situations more entertaining, and some choices Altman has made, like an overreliance on female nudity that borders on the exploitative, difficult to defend. But whenever interest lags, a look, a moment, a frisson of regret will cross the screen and the emotional connection is restored.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about “Short Cuts” is how effortless it all seems. Made with the unforced and casual command that often comes to artists late in life, it is close to magical in the way it draws us into its web, in how the whole comes to be considerably more than the individual parts. Though there are times when very little is going on, at the close the feeling that you’ve experienced more than you anticipated is inescapable. If you want to know what the work of a mature American master is like, this is the place to look.

‘Short Cuts’

Starring Andie MacDowell, Bruce Davison, Julianne Moore, Matthew Modine, Anne Archer, Fred Ward, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Chris Penn, Lili Taylor, Robert Downey Jr., Madeleine Stowe, Tim Robbins, Lily Tomlin, Tom Waits, Frances McDormand, Peter Gallagher, Annie Ross, Lori Singer, Jack Lemmon, Lyle Lovett, Buck Henry, Huey Lewis.

A Cary Brokaw/Avenue Pictures production, in association with Spelling Films International, released by Fine Line Features. Director Robert Altman. Producer Cary Brokaw. Executive producer Scott Bushnell. Screenplay Altman & Frank Barhydt, based on the writings of Raymond Carver. Cinematographer Walt Lloyd. Editor Geraldine Peroni. Costumes John Hay. Music Mark Isham. Production design Stephen Altman. Art director Jerry Fleming. Set decorator Susan J. Emshwiller. Running time: 3 hours, 9 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (graphic sexual language and for nudity).