Rediscover:
California Split
Dir: Robert Altman
1974
Rediscover is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that have flown under the radar and now deserve a second look.
Billed as a comedy, and consistently funny enough to justify if not entirely validate the distinction, California Split is one of Altman's saddest films and also one of his starkest. Following two compulsive gamblers living in Los Angeles, the film first defies expectations by casting two charming comic actors, Elliott Gould and George Segal, in the lead roles. Using their comic strengths as straw men for the actual internal lives he's depicting, Altman lets their jokes function as instruments of self-deception - they're not so much kindred spirits as they are enablers, and their friendship doesn't really extend much further than their mutual habit dictates.
Because the film doesn't really have a central narrative, the focus is placed entirely on the two men and their experiences. They meet at a poker game, as Bill (Segal) helps Charlie (Gould) out of a violent disagreement over the honesty of his playing. Bill is a divorced magazine writer snaking his way towards addiction and Charlie is already there, a gambler both in habit and spirit, his entire life centered on non-stop action and semi-calculated risks. When he tries, just shortly after meeting Bill, to make a wager on who can recall all the names of the Seven Dwarves first, we start to get a sense of his relentlessness. A few nights later, when he turns a mugging into a game by calling bullshit on his armed assailant, his swagger turns from charming to scary and dangerous in the blink of an eye; Charlie's capacity for self-destruction is enormous and his stability is precarious at best. He lays it out on the line and hopes it works out.
Bill, for his part, is tentative. The night they meet, he crashes at Charlie's place, which he shares with two amiable call girls who seem to regard him as something of an older brother. We see the doubt passing over Bill's face as he takes in Charlie's desultory way of life, offering Bill a bowl of cereal with a dirty spoon. Being that his own life's a mess, he chooses to view his reticence as vestigial prudishness and he just goes with it. It's the first of a few rationalizations in the film, each of which are dictated by ever-growing leaps in logic - pretty soon Bill's "taking meetings" at the horse track.
Charlie and Bill are not the only ones, though. Bill, falling into debt and by this point convinced that the best way to fix it is to gamble more, decides to go to an underground poker game, accessed by slipping out the side door of a strip club into a family apartment, past a group of kids watching TV in the living room and into a dim kitchen. Tellingly, he questions this environment less than he did Charlie's place just weeks earlier. A woman approaches Charlie on the bus, seeing he's reading the racing sheet. The way she asks for a tip, bundling her purse up against her chest, and the aimless way she walks around the track later, make her come off like Oliver Twist; meek and displaced. He gives her a bum one, of course, not wanting to screw his odds up, eventually prompting one of the most furious fruit-based assaults I've ever seen ("God damn it, lady, you don't throw oranges on an escalator!"), a moment that is alternately funny and disconcerting - for the callousness of the lie and for the unanticipated explosiveness of her reaction as well - for the hysterical ineffectiveness of her rage, which, if dwelled upon for a moment longer than the laughter lasts, comes back around to the fact that she is probably in a mess of a situation.
Gambling is about callousness, though. It's about putting what you have at risk and accepting the possibility of losing it all and it's about accepting that your victories are ones that require climbing over the miseries of others. I mean, it's also just an idle way to pass the time, I don't want to overstate it, but not if you're serious about it, and this movie's pretty serious about it. Written by a gambling addict, starring at least one gambling addict and directed by a heavy gambler, the production's truthfulness is deeply rooted in its makers' own histories. There are maybe moments of shame, there are definitely moments of great dissatisfaction, both on a more immediate level and of a deeper, more metaphysical sort, but there are no moments of judgment, and that's largely true of Altman's body of work as a whole. Deeply felt, deeply honest, funny and sad, this movie is a slice of life in the purest sense of the phrase. When it ends, you sense the indefinite nature of this conclusion and the whole thing just stays with you, like the heavy air in the parlors you've been taken through. Every so often maybe you find yourself wondering how those guys are doing.
by Andrei Alupului
Note: California Split isn't currently in print on DVD, but is, for some reason, available streaming on Netflix. What's more, this streaming version is more definitive than the DVD release, restoring some scenes and songs from the theatrical release that were previously cut out of the DVD due to varying rights issues.
