Carver Menagerie

I am combining the two stories plus the movie into one blog.

I read the first short of the two Raymond Carver pieces and was nowhere near impressed. The title is "Jerry and Molly and Sam", and I have sudden flashbacks to Faulkner's "Tomorrow". What a useless title.

A man is having an affair, his kids drive him nuts, and the dog... The dog drives him over the edge. He decides to take the dog out and drop it off somewhere, but once home he has a sort of "What the hell am I doing" moment in which he goes back out after the dog. He sees the critter, tries to catch it, but it runs off anyway.

And that's it. No Jerry or Molly or Sam to speak of.

I understand Raymond Carver is one of the legends of the American short story, but I honestly don't see why. The writing style is a bit dry, and I could not really get into the story. Granted, I commend him for writing about Average Joe from Anytown, USA, but the stories are really not that interesting.

The next piece, "A Small, Good Thing", is interesting at first. But then, like a lead balloon, falls to the depths of depression. It starts out with a kid getting hit by a car, on the very day of his birthday. His mother and father are with him up to the point at which he passes away. The mother had prior to the accident ordered a birthday cake. Of course, she couldn't pick it up as her son was in the hospital. So, the baker calls the parents day and night in anger.

After the boy, Scotty, passes away, the parents realize who continuously calls them. They go to the bakery and confront the baker. They exchange some angry words, after which they reconcile and share hot rolls and coffee together with the baker, who tells them his own sap story in a very overdone monologue in which he begs forgiveness.

Carver lays it on pretty thick. I don't know why, perhaps its the depression of it all, but I must say that I liked the previous Carver bit better then this one. The way that he works the melodrama in like an angry baker kneading bread dough is too over-the-top for me to enjoy this work. The characters move from your everyday vernacular to well formed, grammatically meticulous sentences that make his Average Joe and Jane sound like an example from a textbook, and it seems Carver can't decide how his characters should speak.




And now we come to the big one. The single film encompassing nine of Raymond Carvers "Biggest Hits": Short Cuts.

The film is a compilation of a collection of Raymond Carver pieces shot in a way that all of the stories intertwine in one way or another. All the characters interact with other characters from other stories. This concept is pretty cool, and I thought that the screenwriter would bring it all together into a nice, smooth flick. However, there are so many stories with so many characters (twenty-two of them!) that the movie ends up being three hours of confusion. It would have been better off, I think, to have used only three or four stories rather than nine. The confusion would have been less, and the writers would have been able to expand upon the individual characters more thoroughly than director Robert Altman did. As it stands, the characters are not at all fleshed out and are pretty one-dimensional, something that I feel is a shame given the potential for making them into complex rather than confusing characters.

The film Short Cuts was set loose upon the general public in 1993, and it shows. The camera pans, the zooming for dramatic effect, that annoying thing I call the "soap opera stare". The opening sequence featering chemical-spraying helicopters is on its own a full-length motion picture, and it never seems to end. The emphasis on the "medfly" had me thinking that it would play some sort of major role in the story. It doesn't. They kill those off in the opening helicopter scenes, and no more medflys showed themselves in the rest of the movie.

The film features an all-star cast, even bringing in legend Jack Lemon. But the film time is so minimal for each actor due to there being so many of them that you only get short bits of screen time with them. Tom Waits' character, my favorite of the film, gets so much less than he could have had, likely producing, like I said, a much more one-dimensional character.

I must say that, despite the negative qualities of the film, that it wasn't the worst thing I have ever seen. It could have been so much better though.