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Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" depicts a daydream nation that stands astride a faultline. The film is discussed.

Short Cuts' opening images--a quintet of helicopters above nighttime L.A., delivering a payload of insecticide--evoke a special, Californian surrealism and apprehension, at once reassuring and ominous. It's a brilliant device, an abstract, metaphoric visual upon which almost anything might be projected about the modern condition, a glimpse of a hidden fantasy life where technology promotes an illusion of invulnerability and Olympian detachment from life below. It's at once an overture and a tour de force, distinctly apart from the rest of the film (though one of the pilots is among the film's 20 main characters). The heightened, artificially colored look of the 'copters, shot with long lenses that increase both the tension and unreality of the images, contrasts with the more muted visual palette of the rest of the film, whose drab earth tones accurately capture the "real" L.A. as opposed to the movieland version.

If this title sequence is a dreamy prelude with a hint of apocalypse, Short Cuts proper is a film dedicated to a daydream nation literally and metaphorically living astride a faultline. To a greater or lesser extent, each character inhabits a world of his or her own imagining. As usual under Altman's microscope, what passes for normality soon starts to resemble a prolonged state of willed disassociation. Something is missing in these people's lives, and Altman and his actors convey how their realization of hat is elided by an oblique indirectness of living: as if masked by a permanent shadow, yet still discernible. Their inner lives remain undisclosed, classified material even to those closest to them--casually, naturally opaque. The emotional combustion of confrontation seldom comes out into the open; when it does, the consequences can be trivial, or cataclysmic. The film's title doesn't merely allude to the short story form articulated in montage. With characteristic Altman ambiguity and wordplay, it also implicates his characters in a culture of emotional corner-cutting.

This overwhelming sense of intangible incompleteness, a fleetingly glimpsed blankness in the connection of one person to another, correlates to the film's restless, floating point of view, as if somebody were dreaming everything we see. It's not so much omniscience as promiscuity. Meanwhile, Altman's camera and editing contradict, by their effortless demonstration of interconnection, these domestic scenarios of incommunication and breakdown. Short Cuts belongs to a rare, currently revived narrative form of which La Ronde is the classic example, Nashville arguably its high-water mark, and Slacker and City of Hope its most recent instances--though neither of these Nineties artifacts has he requisite sophistication or insight. Slacker was merely twentysomething blahness as zeitgeist; in Short Cuts, though there is much sheer pleasure to be had in the democratic choreography privileged moments, something is unmistakably at stake. Merging Carver's stories, Altman and Frank Barhydt, with quiet, delicate insistence, urge us to reflect upon the unexamined ways we live our lives. To be sure, these cuts aren't cold. Altman's generosity is at times profound, but also unsentimental. There are several transcending moments of grace and pity but the film sneaks up on them. Altman loves reversal. He knows how to level a cool, nonjudgmental gaze at quotidian betrayals and cruelties, only to introduce unforeseen redemption for the heartless and mean-spirited. His dialectical technique is Good Cop-Bad Cop, the mocking and sardonic observations counterbalanced by tender, compassionate ones. (The Player was uncharacteristically unforgiving, but then Altman claimed it was about himself.)

The structuring principle is marriage: each story explores the dynamics of a couple facing overt or covert relationship-threatening crisis. (The exception: a haunting mother-daughter story.) To assign narrative centrality on any couple is irresistible, though possibly fatuous. There are a number of possible permutations, but one reading might follow the lines of social power. Given the ubiquity TV makes possible and the appearance of power it confers, a TV news anchor and his wife (Bruce Davison and Andie MacDowell) are a distinct structural focal point: their pool cleaner, their neighbor and her daughter, the cakemaker who bakes a cake for their young son, the woman who runs the son over, the gifted surgeon who treats him, and the husband's estranged father are all inhabitants of other universes that overlap theirs. At the opposite end of the class scale, another representative of authority and ubiquity, the police officer and his wife (Tim Robbins and Madeleine Stowe) unify another assortment of extended human chains: the cop's girlfriend, a professional party-clown performer whom the cop pulls over, the wife's sister (who is also the surgeon's wife). In no sense does either of these characters assume primacy or regulate the presentation of any of the others; they are merely junction points within a circulatory system. This cross-section of people--white, middle-class--effectively stands in for an entire uneasy culture. Aside from several undisputable but marginal moments containing race tension subtext--which Altman has always incorporated into his films--Short Cuts (unlike the racialized perspective of Lawrence Kasdan's superficially similar Grand Canyon) omits all the politicizing extremes and hotspots of the modern experience. Altman instead situates his politics within the tensions between men and women.

Short Cuts eschews the pure exhilaration and bold tonal shifts of Nashville--a collision of satiric Americana and poetic naturalism--for a more subdued, lyrical idiom and an increasingly hypnotic and hallucinatory texture. The focus is almost entirely domestic and intimate, whereas Nashville, structured around musical performance, was more about the interplay of public and private, seemingly intent on sending its narrative elements spinning off on multiple trajectories. By contrast, Short Cuts slowly seems to draw them together more tightly, so that not only do characters repeatedly crisscross, but their interwoven stories achieve a kind of critical mass of converging personal crisis. Nashville's climax, an attempted assassination during a singer's performance at a political rally, was a moment of galvanizing spectacle, but it resonated primarily at a social level rather than a personal one. Short Cuts' climax foregrounds an event that is bigger than all of the characters put together and that is collectively experienced; it is freighted with their accumulated psychic tensions, fragile dream-life flipping over into nightmare, an inevitable return of the repressed.

As the aphorism goes, once is an accident, twice a coincidence, three times a conspiracy: Altman, always an uncanny master of ceremonies, has made another dazzling conspiracy. There are no short cuts.