3 Women - Criterion Collection

- 3 Women - Criterion Collection

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Manufacturer: Criterion
Release Date: 2004-04-20

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Review
In a dusty, under-populated California resort town, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), a naive and impressionable Southern waif begins her life as a nursing home attendant. There, Pinky finds her role model in fellow nurse "Thoroughly Modern" Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall), a misguided would-be sophisticate and hopeless devotee of Cosmopolitan and Woman's Day magazines. When Millie accepts Pinky into her home at the Purple Sage singles' complex, Pinky's hero-worship evolves into something far stranger and more sinister than either could have anticipated. Featuring brilliant performances from Spacek and Duvall, Robert Altman's dreamlike masterpiece, 3 Women, careens from the humorous to the chilling to the surreal, resulting in one of the most unusual and compelling films of the 1970s.

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Customer Reviews
Summary: Whats the BFD about Shelley Duvall? Overall Rating: Comment: Robert Altman noted in the commentary that he heard a French movie poster refer to 3 Women as "1 woman becomes 2. 2 women become 3. 3 women become 1." I agree (okay did that sound pretentious? Hey, I agree with the director) but the movie is pretty slow and the "1 woman becomes 2" part takes about 1.5 hours to get to. Slow moving. Milly and Pinky end up becoming roommates. I liked how hard Milly tries to be social and to fit in with the crowd but she just doesnt. Milly takes forever in the bathroom and likes to cook. Pinky tends to get bossed around by Milly - running after her like a puppy at times. Then Pinky gets head trauma and takes over Milly's personality. There's also random shots of this pregnant woman sand painting the pool. She's the 3rd woman. I thought Sissy Spacek was the stand out actress in this film, but in the commentary, Robert Altman couldnt stop talking about Shelley Duvall. This is one of those movies where you might be like, I dont really know what that was all about but I liked it. I wasnt one of those people. Summary: Robert Altman's Sleeper Masterpiece Overall Rating: Comment: I remember first seeing this film on the A&E channel in the late 1980's. It grabbed my attention from the beginning and I ended up watching the entire thing. Even though much of the film is deliberately meant to be ambiguous, I found it to be fascinating. I always interpreted it as a film about insecurity and the desire for the characters to be different people than who they really are. The Shelly Duvall character (Millie) is a decent person but she's not the social butterfly that she desperately wants to be. Despite Millies' delusions about herself, the Sissy Spacek character wants to be just like Millie because she seems to have no personality of her own. The Edgar character seems to have wanted to have been a tough guy/cowboy, but in reality is a burned-out, pathetic drunk. I'm still somewhat confused as to how the Janice Rule character fits into the whole scheme. This is one of the few films where you feel like you're watching real people and not just actors portraying people and despite the bizarre ending (which I still don't fully understand). This is an excellent film. Summary: Schizophrenic Altman finds middle ground Overall Rating: Comment: Robert Altman's 1977 film 3 Women, which he wrote and directed from a dream he had, is not a bad film, but not a great film either. It is one of those films, ala Robert Browning, whose reach exceeds its grasp, but not in the good way. It is intended to work on a dream level, yet it is too realistic in its detail for much of the film to be seen as all dream, and not quite bizarre enough to be real dream, especially in its far too forced, and ultimately failed, ending. Some critics have likened the film to Ingmar Bergman's Persona, but this is a stretch. Even though that film is a bit overrated in the Bergman canon, 3 Women is nowhere in that league as a work of art: not as film, social commentary, nor work of symbolism. It has some elements in common with Roman Polanski's Repulsion, about another female misfit on the verge of insanity, as well as to the later, and far inferior, David Lynch mystery film Mulholland Drive, which was also about two women in a dreamy scenario. The film follows the life of two lonely women who can only be called 'losers'. Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) is an ugly worker at a California old folks' health spa. She is unpopular, shunned by her co-workers- who ignore her blather despite her not realizing it, yet lives in a world of her own making, where all people like her, she is among the popular set, and life is made better by magazine ads and cooking recipes that involve all pre-processed foods and no real cooking ability. She is so clueless that every time she drives her mustard colored heap of a car her yellow skirt always gets caught in the door, and hangs outside. She also wears hideous yellow bathrobes with hoods to her apartment complex's pool, yet thinks all the men desire her. She becomes co-workers and roommates ($55 a month- those were the days!) with an even odder girl who comes to work at the spa, one day, and seems to lack a past, even though she claims to be from Texas, like Millie. Her name is also Mildred, although she goes by the nickname Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek). Pinky is a redhead who seems almost autistic (as she would be labeled these days), and is even less capable of existing in the world....The third woman of the film is an older woman, Willie Hart (Janice Rule), who is pregnant, cold, silent, and paints bizarre man-hating pictures of pregnant gargoyle-like creatures on tiles and in pools, that seem to betray her bitterness, especially toward her no account husband, Edgar (Robert Fortier), a buffoonish would be macho man, and ex-stunt double in Western films, who is as big a joke to his sex as the two girls are to theirs, due to his penchant for guns, motorcycles, and beer. The two of them own the apartment complex, The Purple Sage- a sort of pre-Melrose Place Melrose Place for losers, the two girls share an apartment in, and also own a crappy bar, Dodge City, out in the desert, where macho loses race dirt bikes...Then, Altman tanks the film with wan surrealism that fails...It is best described as that misfit beast- 'the noble failure.' Robert Altman has always been a hit and miss director....and, unlike Michelangelo Antonioni's best films, which often seem to end not at their chronological ends, this film's ending is not the work of a carefully placed artist's inventiveness, just stylized randomness rationalized after the fact. Summary: Robert Altman you haven't sene Overall Rating: Comment: I am an Altman fan but had not seen this movie before. It is really different while being very Altman. I found it to be a little difficult to get into; but very rewarding. The quality of the DVD is very high (of course, it's Criterion). The picture looks great. Summary: Ambiguous And Surreal Overall Rating: Comment: 3 WOMEN is one strange movie. From the first shots of elderly people with flesh that is both flabby and withered slowly moving in a therapy pool with their attendants the viewer knows that this is not a typical Hollywood offering. Set somewhere in the Palm Springs vicinity the action moves mostly between three specific places - the therapy center where two of the women work, a Western bar called "Dodge City" and an apartment complex, "The Purple Sage". The film does have a definite plot but that plot is wide open to interpretation. The three women are Millie, Pinky (who claims her real name is Mildred but is she reliable?) and the pregnant and nearly silent Willie. Millie is played brilliantly by Shelley Duvall. A clueless loser who tries too hard and never stops talking, Millie, works at the therapy center, lives at "The Purple Sage" and hangs out at the "Dodge City" bar where for all her talk of boyfriends and dates her only lover seems to be Edgar, Willie's middle aged, ex Hollywood cowboy husband who owns both the bar and Millie's apartment complex. Willie is played by Janice Rule as a strange beautiful woman who seems almost too old to be pregnant and floats through the movie mostly silent, painting weird scenes. Sissy Spacek's Pinky seems childlike and naive when we meet her and also when we last see her in the haunting closing scenes. She comes to work at the therapy center pool and is invited to become fellow Texan Millie's roommate. Pinky is perhaps the most enigmatic of all the characters in this very quirky film as we don't know whether to see her as an innocent or a master manipulator. A visit from an elderly couple who claim to be her parents raises more questions than it answers. The entire movie is dreamlike and a long actual dream sequence right before the tragic climax of the film does little to enhance the plot. The movie is definitely "out there" but the fine acting and direction hold the viewer's attention. This is a great film to watch with others since is raises so many intriguing questions to discuss.

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