The Player (1992)

The main thing I knew going in was that lots of familiar names were attached to it. But only a handful of famous people in the "all-star cast" get important roles; most have walk-ons as themselves, and I'm afraid many of those have not had enduring star power. Regardless, it's also highly rated across sites and boasts a few awards and nominations, so I had better reasons to check it out.

Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is a Hollywood producer as sleazy as any. One of the writers he brushed off starts sending anonymous, increasingly threatening postcards. He tracks down a likely candidate, David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio), and offers to make it up to him, but Kahane rudely declines, having read that Mill is losing pull, if not his job, to an up-and-comer (Peter Gallagher). With that nerve struck, Mill accidentally kills Kahane. He obscures the evidence, but it doesn't take long for the police to suspect him. And then the postcards continue....

Oh, it's not all bad for the antihero. Kahane's girlfriend (Greta Scacchi) is quick to move on to Mill, who has lost interest in his secretary (Cynthia Stevenson). The R rating is partly for swearing and partly for Mill's sex scenes with both women, tho Scacchi refused to be go nude. Of course, this relationship doesn't exactly reduce suspicions.

If you've inferred that I care more about the crime drama/thriller than the comedy, you're right. For all the claims of hilarity, I could rarely even tell when it was supposed to be funny. When Mill asks why everyone around him is laughing and they don't explain, I empathize. Maybe you have to be more of a show business insider to know when things are exaggerated to comic proportions. Only near the end did I feel the slightest tickle, brought on largely by a meta aspect, and it was tempered by a tragic undercurrent.

The other possibility is that you have to be very sharp when you watch. Our attention is often divided, with the camera and microphones steering us to unrelated conversations regarding cinema. It takes a while even to settle enough to clarify who the protagonist is. The dialog tends to be realistically messy, too.

Looking back, I really don't have much use for Robert Altman. He has a Woody Allen-like disregard for screen justice without the creativity to make up for it. MASH didn't amuse me nearly as much as the ensuing TV series. Nashville meandered too much. McCabe & Mrs. Miller has almost completely escaped my memory. Gosford Park is OK, and The Long Goodbye works decently as a neo-noir, but I won't bother with the rest of his efforts.

If I got one thing out of TP, it was a crash course in the careers of the depicted celebs. Beyond that, I probably shouldn't have bothered.