The Player (1992)

Official trailer

The Player is Robert Altman’s 1992 American satire adapting Michael Tolkin’s 1988 novel of the same name.

The film depicts Hollywood studio executive Griffin Mill receiving threats from a screenwriter whose call he promised to return and never did. Mill investigates which writer is sending him the threats, identifies the wrong suspect, and accidentally kills the man during a confrontation. Mill later begins a relationship with the dead writer’s girlfriend while continuing to evade investigation into the killing. Tim Robbins plays Mill. Greta Scacchi plays artist June Gudmundsdottir.

Fred Ward plays studio security chief Walter Stuckel. Whoopi Goldberg plays Detective Susan Avery. Peter Gallagher plays competing executive Larry Levy. Brion James plays studio president Joel Levison. Cynthia Stevenson plays Mill’s girlfriend Bonnie Sherow. Tolkin wrote the screenplay from his novel. Avenue Pictures Productions produced the film on a budget of approximately 8 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 28 million dollars worldwide. The work received three Academy Award nominations including Best Director.

I think this is the meanest, funniest movie Hollywood ever made about itself, and Hollywood showing up to be in it makes the joke better. Tim Robbins’s smile is what stays with me, that bright, reasonable face on a man who has just gotten away with killing somebody.

The film is the principal Hollywood-about-Hollywood satire and Robert Altman’s comeback production after a difficult period in the 1980s. The cast includes sixty-five cameo appearances by actual movie stars playing themselves, from considerable scenes with Burt Reynolds and Lily Tomlin to brief sightings of Cher and Bruce Willis. The opening tracking shot runs approximately eight minutes without visible edits and is often cited as one of the great long takes in American cinema.

The Robbins performance combines surface charm with the moral hollowness that the satire required. The work showed that Altman’s ensemble method could engage Hollywood as subject without the production conditions corrupting the satirical content. The result restored Altman’s career and produced one of his strongest late works.

The Opening Tracking Shot

The film opens with an approximately eight-minute tracking shot that moves through a Hollywood studio’s exterior parking and into multiple offices at once while characters discuss long takes in famous films.

The shot is a single unbroken take, chosen from about fifteen that Altman filmed. This self-consciously references the long takes the characters are discussing while delivering one. The opening establishes the film’s metatextual quality without compromising entertainment value.

Altman directed the shot, and cinematographer Jean Lépine shot it.

Multiple cast members performed across the extended sequence. Burt Reynolds, Buck Henry, and several others appear in the opening, often in single takes that required precise coordination. The sequence shows technical mastery while making jokes about technical mastery. The double-edged quality establishes the film’s tone immediately. The Player works on multiple levels.

The opening shot is my favorite joke in the film. Characters stroll through the lot talking about famous long takes while Altman pulls one off all around them, and I grin through the whole eight minutes.

Robbins as Mill

Tim Robbins plays Griffin Mill as a studio executive whose professional competence depends on his moral compartmentalization. Mill can deliver bad news with practiced sympathy. He can refuse projects with manufactured enthusiasm. He can attend meetings while planning to evade legal consequences for murder. The performance combines surface charm with underlying emptiness that the role required. Robbins played Mill at the level of dramatic seriousness instead of comic exaggeration. The method was correct.

Mill is a comic figure but the comedy depends on taking him seriously as a representative of Hollywood executive culture instead of as caricature. Robbins plays him as recognizable type instead of mockery. The audience can identify Mill as the kind of executive who runs Hollywood studios. That wouldn’t be possible if Robbins had played the character as exaggerated villain. The serious dramatic approach to comedic content produces stronger satire than caricature would have generated.

Robbins is the reason the film cuts so deep for me. I believe every smooth phone call and every sympathetic nod, and that’s what makes Mill scary. A cartoon villain would have let the audience off the hook, and Robbins never does.

The Cameo Strategy

Sixty-five actual celebrities make cameo appearances in The Player, playing themselves.

Burt Reynolds, Lily Tomlin, Cher, Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, Susan Sarandon, and others appear in everything from extensive dialogue scenes to brief sightings. The cameos serve multiple functions. They show that real Hollywood participated in the satire of its own industry. They give the film documentary-like Hollywood realism that fictional reconstruction couldn’t achieve. They produce humor through recognition without requiring narrative justification.

The strategy required Altman to convince celebrities to participate in a satire of their own industry.

The director’s reputation made the recruitment possible. Celebrities who wouldn’t have appeared in a hostile production were willing to participate in Altman’s. The willingness signaled that the satire was within acceptable bounds for Hollywood’s own self-criticism. The film criticizes Hollywood while remaining within the industry’s tolerance for satire. The result has been criticized as Hollywood satire that doesn’t threaten Hollywood. The criticism has merit but doesn’t invalidate what the film achieves.

The critics have a point here, and it’s the one reservation I have. The cameos are a blast, and they also feel like a club letting you watch it laugh at itself. The satire bites hard, and it still stops short of drawing blood from anyone who’d have to approve Altman’s next picture.

Is The Player as good as people say?

Of all the Hollywood-about-Hollywood satires, I’d put The Player above the rest, and it’s the film that brought Robert Altman back.

I give it a 9 for that opening shot, for Robbins’s charming emptiness and for how nastily it skewers the business of making movies. I hold back the last point because the satire stays polite to the people it’s mocking. Watch it if you care about Hollywood satire, about Altman or about films that can be funny and chilling in the same scene.

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