Brewster McCloud

In 1970, MASH provided Robert Altman with his one and only mega-hit. His choice as a follow up, and he had the freedom to choose anything, turned out to be the strangest and most idiosyncratic film of a career that would always be unconventional.

Which leads to the question, what kind of film is Brewster McCloud? Is it a modernization of the Icarus myth as commentary on the soon to be former idealism of the sixties? Is it a juvenile comedy with a lot of bird shit jokes? It may be kind of both, but I believe it’s also a blueprint, a rough draft of the kind of filmmaker Robert Altman wanted to be.

If Robert Altman would spend much of the seventies deconstructing different film genres, Brewster McCloud would be his “comedy”, but as an Altman comedy, it wouldn’t play by the rules. Its bone dry humor would not come into fashion until Wes Anderson became its spokesman. With a loose structure, it was broad enough to directly parody the Steve McQueen’s then recent hit, Bullet, and provide such Altmanesque touches as using a connective device (here, the lecturer) and introduce such quirky characters as Shelly Duval in her movie debut.

A tight film it is not, but it announces that fact immediately in the opening credits, which Altman often utilizes to instruct an audience how a particular film should be watched. In “A Cinema of Loneliness,” Robert Phillip Kolker describes it in detail:

“The MGM logo appears, but instead of the expected lion’s roar, there is a voice saying, “I forgot the opening line.” The film cannot quite get itself started. No smooth entry into the story is promised. A rather strange man appears, a lecturer who talks to us about birds, men, the dream of flight and environmental enclosures. As he is about to speak of the last, there is a shot of the Houston Astrodome and in it Margaret Hamilton, the wicked witch of The Wizard of Oz attempting to lead a marching band of black musicians in the national anthem. The credits begin. Hamilton stops the band and attempts to get them to sing on key. The credits begin AGAIN, and the band breaks into gospel, completely out of control. This film, which will concern itself with the conflict of freedom and constraint announces this conflict from the beginning, not only in its images, but in the difficulty it has getting its images started. Brewster McCloud parodies itself, its existence as a controlled formal structure from the very start.”

By extension, Kolker seems to suggest that Altman might not just be deconstructing comedy, but film itself. Before we ponder this too deeply, bird shit jokes soon follow. However the low comedy does give way to a consistent Altman theme, the individual’s place in the community. While MASH posited that a sub-culture of hedonists could make wartime bearable, Brewster (played coldly by Bud Cort of Harold and Maude fame) chooses to isolate himself from any sense of community, denying even his guardian angel and single mindedly following his dream of individual flight at all costs. This certainly hints of tragic undertones beneath the silliness.