The late director Robert Altman (1925-2006) had an incredibly long and fruitful career, working on many different genres both in TV and in film.  Some of the output highlights include MASH (the original movie starring Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland), McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, The Player, and the delightfully quirky pseudo-Agatha Christie mystery/comedy Gosford Park.

Of all the films and TV shows he was involved in, it is fair to say that many of his fans consider Quintet, Altman’s -and star Paul Newman’s- sole 1979 foray into sci-fi his most divisive work.  And that’s being kind.

Here’s the movie’s trailer:

Quintet involves a world on the verge of apocalypse that has entered a new ice-age (the cause of this is not explained, though one could presume this might be the result of a nuclear winter).  Paul Newman plays Essex, a seal hunter from the south who, along with his pregnant companion Vivia (Brigitte Fosse), traveled to one of the last remaining “cities”, another frozen hell-hole.  Seals no longer exist and Essex needs to find another means of survival along with his companion.  They go to this city in search of Essex’s brother and, once they arrive, we realize that Vivia is, unlike the other city inhabitants, quite young.  This is surprising to Essex’s brother and people living with him.

We also find that the citizens of this city are into Quintet (who’da guessed?!), a dice/board game which figures into the movie’s plot.

The people of the city, apart from being older in age, share a seeming malaise.  Packs of dogs roam this frozen city and chow down on anyone who dies while, true to form, very few care.  Indeed, the viewer soon realizes the citizens feel more than just malaise: They’ve given up.  There’s little left to do but play Quintet and wait for the end.

As you know, I’m loathe to give away too much of a movie’s plot but I’ll proceed to one more element, which puts the story in motion.  However, given it happens some thirty minutes plus into the movie, it is a SPOILER…

Still there?

Ok, Essex finds his brother and, after introducing himself and Vivia to everyone, leaves them in their apartment home and heads out, looking for work.

While away and while Essex’s brother, Vivia, and the others are busy playing Quintet, a mysterious stranger silently opens the apartment door and rolls a bomb into their living room.  It explodes, killing everyone, including Vivia, in the blast.

Essex hears the blast and rushes back to the apartment and finds everyone dead.  He also sees the man responsible for the killings and gives chase.  However, before he gets to him, the man is attacked by another and his throat slashed.  Essex finds the killer’s still very warm corpse and searches through his belongings.  He finds a list of people’s names along with Quintet game trinkets.

Essex takes these items and assumes the man’s identity, his goal being figuring out why the man a) killed his brother and Vivia and b) why he himself was killed.

Soon enough, Essex comes to realize the game of Quintet extends well beyond the board.

I’ll stop withe movies SPOILERS here and turn to my feelings regarding the movie:

In some ways I found Quintet a fascinating work while in others I felt the people who made the film, those both in front of and behind the camera, failed… at times quite spectacularly.

The first big failure, and it pains me to say it, is hiring Paul Newman for the movie’s lead.  Please understand: I usually love Paul Newman’s work as an actor but in this case… it just felt like he was the wrong choice for the role.  This is most apparent in the sequences right after he finds Vivia’s dead body.  Paul Newman’s reaction is curiously muted and almost a non reaction.  This, to me, was a big problem.  Newman’s playing Essex as a far too unemotional individual and this, sadly, works against us caring for him, his tragedy, and subsequent need for revenge.

The next big problem the film has is director Robert Altman’s decision to film the entire movie with Vaseline around the edges of the frame.  Let me repeat: THE ENTIRE MOVIE features blurry images along all four sides of the screen and, while in theory one could view that as an interesting choice to further emphasize the “cold” nature of the scenery around us, its distracting and silly.  Yeah, Altman and company tried to do something different but in this case it just didn’t work.

Another problem: The sets at times don’t look all that good.  There are more than a few moments where you feel like you’re watching some kind of cheap and overwrought play in a local (frozen) park.

Which leads me to one final big problem: Paul Newman is surrounded with a cast whose native tongue, for the most part, is not English.  This becomes a big problem in scenes which feature plenty of dialogue infused with the movie’s philosophical ideas.

So those are the movie’s minuses, and they are considerable.

Yet after pointing these problems out, as the movie played I nonetheless found myself curious as to where the story was going.  Where it went, in its conclusion, was particularly strong, at least in my opinion.

Despite the strong ending, I simply can’t recommend the film to a “regular” audience.  However, if you’re willing to take a ride that’s far from the ordinary and ignore the problems I listed above, you may find yourself intrigued by this film.  At least intrigued enough to not feel like you just wasted two hours of your life.