3 Women

There’s Mildred (Millie) (Shelley Duvall) (Olive Oyl?) and then there’s Mildred (Pinky) (Millie) (Sissy Spacek) (Carrie?) and then there’s Willie (Janice Rule) and Lillie (uh … wait a minute, that’s 4 women …). Okay, there’s no Lillie. I think. Millie, Millie, and Willie (and maybe Lillie) live in the desert. Millie and Millie work at a place where old people sit in bathtubs and walk in pools. Lillie (or maybe Willie, or Milli Vanilli), who doesn’t talk, paints odd murals on the bottoms of swimming pools. She’s pregnant. Millie moves in with Millie. Millie is child-like, until she gets a concussion jumping into Millie’s swimming pool. (It’s full of water, and a mural.) Then she turns into Carrie. Millie is a constant talker, but nobody listens to her. Willie’s husband (Billie?) fucks up, and the baby dies. Millie and Millie kill him, and bury him under a pile of old tires. Then it looks like Millie may or may not be Millie’s mother. Marie Dressler isn’t in the movie (though wasn’t she great in Tillie’s Punctured Romance and Tugboat Annie?), but Jean-Claude Killy puts in a brief appearance as the bewildered downhill skier from France. And it’s all a bit sillie.

Believe it or not, the above paragraph makes as much sense as this movie does. Robert Altman was one of the top American directors of all time, but he made his share of boners after his amazing streak beginning with M*A*S*H. He took a lot of chances, skated close to the edge, and when you do that some of it just ain’t gonna work. This came during that period, when most critics were writing him off (deservedly, I think), as irrelevant, along with the pretty bad Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson and the just plain awful Quintet. Luckily for all of us, he got it back together in the decade before his death.