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20. Julie Christie as Constance Miller in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (1971)
Saturday, July 3, 2010
8:13 PM
 After winning a Best Actress Oscar for Darling, Julie Christie was again nominated for her role in Robert Altman’s masterpiece McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), losing out to Jane Fonda’s performance in Klute (the win I consider to be the category’s all-time best). Christie’s nomination alone, I imagine, may have been a bit surprising back in the day; though she was also in The Go-Between, a considerable success, that same year, her performance in Altman’s work was considerably ignored by most awards’ bodies. It’s fascinating to me, then, that the Academy would recognize this kind of performance; Christie’s Mrs. Miller is so unlike any creation I’ve seen before, especially from her, and certainly from any other Best Actress nominee. It’s a performance devoid of any obvious character trajectory; Altman’s directed the film in such a way that so much of the titular relationship happens off-screen. He’s more focused, after all, on creating a vivid picture of the world the two inhabit.
Christie made a name for herself personifying the female spirit of Swinging London – she was the carefree Liz of Billy Liar, the amoral Diana Scott of Darling, the perplexing title character of Richard Lester’s Petulia. And yet in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, we see Christie stripped bare of what we’ve known her for. She’s no longer the girl emblematic of the Swinging Sixties but now a stand-in for a different era’s mindset; in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, it’s the age of American frontierism. Her Mrs. Miller’s so unlike anything Christie’s ever played that we’re excited to see what she’ll do with this role, and it doesn’t seem she holds back – at no point in the film do I get that writhing feeling that she is “acting”. Rather, her Constance Miller is a contradiction she presents to us on the screen without hesitation – she is earthy but emotional, savage but maternal; she’s a woman who embodies the pragmatism of the American entrepreneurial spirit yet somehow also possesses the kind of tender, motherly qualities that others would expect of a woman of her time.
Throughout the film’s two hour duration, Christie’s a fleeting presence; we only see her appear, tangibly, in a few scenes. And yet she lingers in our mind – she lurks over the film like some sort of maternal presence; we get the feeling that she’s watching over everything with her practical, protective spirit. She’s not only a mother to her hookers, but a mother to the town’s potential for business; Constance is especially a mother of sorts to Beatty’s McCabe, whom she almost intimidates with her straightforwardness. We first meet Mrs. Miller when she approaches, in a sort of hostile way, McCabe, proposing a business offer; they strike up a deal over dinner at the local tavern, where Constance heartily devours this full meal. In Darling, she was childlike and attention-seeking; here, she couldn’t be more unlike Diana Scott. From this first encounter alone we realize what’s in store for the dynamics in this business relationship.
 McCabe & Mrs. Miller, along with Klute, was one of the films of New Hollywood that truly challenged previous Hollywood conceptions of women’s societal roles; one of the many things Altman’s trying to do is to re-codify our perceptions of traditional gender roles. And Christie, unexpectedly, couldn’t be better in fulfilling this; I can’t imagine anyone else in this role of a hardened woman who has such a deep understanding of the world she’s living in and how she wants to manipulate it. She captures a certain moment in time’s spirit and mindset unflinchingly; she surprises us with her wit, her toughness, and yet, most of all, her undyingly maternal spirit. And yet we always slowly feel that Constance’s spirit is collapsing – note Christie’s brilliantly-acted reaction to McCabe’s rejection of a potentially lucrative offer. The end of the dream is inevitable – Beatty’s gunned down by the big boys who’ve been commissioned to kill him. We feel enough sympathy when he falls victim to the ‘big businessmen’; hope is dead. And yet it’s that final shot – seeing Mrs. Miller transfixed in her downbeat, closed-off, opium haze – through which we feel that her spirit, and the community’s spirit as a whole, has been deadened.
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