Every time I search for a particular review from At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on YouTube, for the next month, the algorithm suggests other episodes from the duo for me. And I love it! After checking in to see what the two late film critics had to say about Miami Blues (normally, when the two are not aligned, I side with Roger, but Siskel liked the film and Ebert didn’t, surprisingly), their “Best of 1992” episode popped up in my recommendations. As one would expect, both men loved Robert Altman’s The Player, a neo-noir inverted mystery set amongst the wheelings and dealings of high profile Hollywood studio bigwigs. Although the film is very much a product of the early 1990s, with stars who were household names at the time (playing characters or cameoing as themselves) and may or may not be recognizable to a modern audience, the story itself is still very accessible even if the culture is somewhat alien to us now, nearly thirty-five years later. 

Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is an executive who is respected at his studio for being the “writer’s guy,” liaising between upper management and the screenwriters who come into his office to pitch their ideas, preferably in twenty-five words or less. His long day of hearing concepts as scintillating as “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman,” “Ghost meets Manchurian Candidate,” and a sequel about Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross’s daughter called The Graduate II (pitched by Buck Henry himself in a cameo) is interrupted by the latest in a series of threatening postcards from a writer who believes Griffin has blown him off. Sensing potential impending career troubles as the result of an up-and-coming exec, Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), abandoning ship at Fox, coupled with the unplanned visit of tacky junior executives from the bank that finances the studio, Griffin combs through his files to try and figure out who might be sending the poison pen notes. 

Concluding it must have been a writer named Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio), Griffin visits the man’s house and calls from his cellphone, surreptitiously spying on Kahane’s girlfriend, a painter named June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), when she answers. He flirts with her, and she tells him that Kahane has gone to a repertory screening of The Bicycle Thief. Griffin then unconvincingly “accidentally” runs into Kahane there, and the normally teetotal Griffin agrees to talk business over drinks at a local karaoke place. There, Kahane grows increasingly frustrated with Griffin’s apparent condescension and the two part ways, but when they encounter one another on the street, a scuffle ensues, during which Griffin ends up killing the screenwriter. Coming to his senses, Griffin makes it look like a mugging and flees the scene. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Detective Avery (Whoopi Goldberg) tracks him down, and she’s clearly not convinced by his protestations of innocence. His girlfriend, story editor Bonnie Sherow (Cynthia Stevenson), can also tell that something’s off, even before he goes to Kahane’s funeral and ends up beginning an affair with June. Perhaps worst of all, Griffin continues to receive threats from his stalker, which means he did it all for nothing. 

The film is, despite the presence of this murder, a fairly soft satire of the film industry. Mockery is made of the contemporary studio system’s flaws: an overreliance on test screening feedback, the inherent difficulties of trying to create art in a hypercapitalistic system, and the resultant way that catering to the sentiments of the lowest common denominator (especially with regards to demands for happy endings and uncomplicated morals) damages artistic integrity. It’s sharp, but it’s not necessarily cutting. As Altman himself noted, there’s not a single agent in the film, just actors, writers, executives, and the occasional director. Just like Griffin himself, he’s not “afraid of ‘political,’” only of “radically political [and] political politica.” Ultimately, it’s very cynical about the world that undergirds the movies that we all love so much, but it never quite becomes as mean spirited as it might have. Although he kills a man in a fit of paranoid, drunken rage, the most cutthroat things that Griffin does are cutting loose his the devoted, professional, and loyal Bonnie for the younger, more buxom, blonder June and deliberately allowing Larry Levy to take credit for signing on a film that Griffin recognizes is impossible, so that he can later swoop in and save the day, thus saving his own career. The most salient thing that the film does is have an intentionally absurd happy ending despite all that comes before, just as the film with the film, Habeas Corpus, originally a downer awards-baiter, ends with a one-liner and a kiss. 

The Player goes more for the darkly comic than the noirishly gritty, but what it sacrifices there it makes up for with its nearly constant stream of witticisms and dependably funny players. Fred Ward is a lot of fun as the studio’s fixer who also waxes poetic about the golden years of Hollywood; Richard E. Grant is as impeccable as ever as a director with a grand vision for an unworkable Oscar bait film (alongside a typically hyperactive Dean Stockwell as his manager); even country musician Lyle Lovett gets in on the action as the unsettling man following Griffin around the city in a role that feels like it was written for Crispin Glover. The only place where this really falls flat is in the performance of Whoopi Goldberg, who is not on her A-game in this picture. The actors who appear in cameo roles were encouraged to ad-lib their dialogue, which offers up great opportunities, like when an unprompted Malcolm McDowell insults Griffin, leading to real befuddlement on the part of Robbins, but Whoopi does several painfully unfunny bits that all seem to go on forever, especially the one about trying to find her tampons. It’s also worth noting that Greta Scacchi’s performance here is nothing to write home about either, but at least that’s potentially an intentional acting choice, as her general blank slate nature allows for Griffin to project whatever he wants onto her. In contrast to loyal, flat-chested Bonnie, June is forever dressed in silks and thin fabrics that do nothing to disguise her nipples. She is breasting boobily at all times, and she play-acts at having depth through her art. When speaking of her late boyfriend, she says that she never really thought of him as talented, ironically standing in the midst of several “artworks” that are composed of the word “ice” surrounded by cool colors. I might not be giving Scacchi enough credit for making her such an effective representation of a boring-but-hot woman trying to seem deeper than she is, but if it’s a deliberate choice, it’s relatively successful. 

In a modern context, the most off-putting thing that an audience may have trouble with isn’t the murder of Kahane, but getting lost in trying to keep up with the cavalcade of stars in the film, and tracking who’s playing themselves and who’s playing a character within the film itself. I’d also wager that an uninitiated viewer may find themselves distracted by the never-ending series of cameo appearances, especially for those whose stars have diminished in the intervening decades. Any audience would still know Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, Burt Reynolds, and Cher, of course, but Sally Kirkland, David Alan Grier, and Robert Wagner? If you’re reading this, then those names are probably at least somewhat familiar to you at the very, very least, but to the under-thirty set? Probably not so much. The best advice I can give to someone coming to this film so long after the film’s release is to just go with the flow and have a good time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond