Brewster McCloud

This movie is a million things at once. Some may find that as a bit of a turn-off, but then that's what a cult classic film is really about, isn't it?

Brewster McCloud is a reclusive boy who lives in the basement of the Houston Astrodome. He has a short job as chauffeur for a miserly old man. He is looked down upon for his meek appearance and his quiet manner. He dreams of building himself a set of wings and using those to fly away from all this suffering.

That's how the film starts, anyway. There are three basic stories in the movie: (1) Brewster McCloud's coming-of-age story, (2) the parallel metaphor of Brewster McCloud's dream of flying away from worldly sorrow, and (3) the murders of people who mistreat Brewster and who all die with raven droppings on their faces.

The real irony of this film is how the character of the Lecturer keeps pointing out similarities between the characters and certain birds, and yet the ending comes around, and we learn how unlike birds we are. There is so much information about birds, you wonder if this was an adult remake of an after-school special.

Overall, I'll have to use the word most of the other reviewers have used: quirky. There are things which are very different. There is the Pythonesque beginning where, as a woman sings the National Anthem and the credits roll, she stops, tells the band to try again in the right key, and the credits restart as well as the singing. There are small bits such as when a police officer holds up a lighter when his partner says there's only one way to know for sure if there's marijuana in a cigarette. And there is my favorite character, the Lecturer, who lectures the audience about the behavior of birds while he himself starts making strange noises and begins pecking at seeds...

The key to understanding this film is to realize it is unmistakably surrealist in the formal sense - directly comparable to the works of European Surrealists like for example Luis Buñuel. His film "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" came out in '72, that is after Brewster McCloud, and if you've seen both films, it is not a stretch at all to surmise that it may well have been Buñuel who was influenced by Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud (which after all came out two years before Buñuel's film.) And as in Buñuel's film, the surrealism in Brewster McCloud certainly has a humorous aspect, but is at its heart a vehicle for subversive but oblique social commentary: oblique because this movie in its ultra-hip cool sensibility would feel obliged to start mocking itself if it actually started preaching to anyone. But of course this film does actually mock itself, along with everything else in the known universe. That is what surrealism is: When you start literally mocking *everything* it ceases to be funny, and rather something much more fundamentally disturbing. And yet this film is easily one of the most accessible of the truly surrealist masterpieces. It is good-natured about everyone and everything it mocks.

One of the pleasant surprises I had upon discovering this film was how realistically it portrays Texans and Houstonians. There is no hackneyed accents or cowboy hats - it really does depict Texans (and specifically Houstonians) as they are - at least as they were in 1970. I'll give one example: The undercover cop is at the zoo with his wife and kid, and his wife says, "Johnny wants to go see the monkeys", and the dad responds, "Well, let him go to N*gger Town then." Now, as a matter of fact, I have scores of relatives from Houston, and I remember as a child how people from Houston talked around 1970, and I know that that was a common but offensive colloquialism for the black part of town in Houston back then. So the period detail is just spot on. And there's no judgment when the character says this. It could be he dies mysteriously later in the film with bird poop on him, but so do a dozen other characters - not all of them bad. And also, they must have had real Houston cops playing some of the cops in the film, or they might as well have. But beyond the negative attributes of the period, this film is in many ways a heartfelt homage to the city of Houston - there are plenty of just plain normal folks who must have been local extras plunked down into this phantasmagoria of a film.

When I say "surrealist" one big aspect of that is the disjointed, disengaged banal "conversations" between various characters, where they seem to be saying stuff at random, and not even paying attention to each other. And yet its still simply fascinating for some odd reason to listen to them - you are literally hanging on every meaningless word. Sally Kellerman is some sort of angel, but for no apparent reason decides to shop-lift a huge amount of film while at the camera store. When the employee who was previously lusting after her chases her down to confront her about the theft, she start pulling bottles of shampoo out of her purse and giving some convoluted explanation why she has so much shampoo, which has nothing to do with any action that has transpired previously in the film. But even banal bits of conversation that are superficially "normal" come off as highly ironic. Shelly Duvall throws up over the railing at the Astrodome, her boyfriend walks up right then and they passionately kiss right after she throws up. Then they notice his dad who is cop is dead nearby, And Shelly says, "What should we do". And her boyfriend says, "Call the cops." And he reaches down and starts pulling something out of the dead guy's shirt pocket, and Shelly Duvall says, "What are you doing?" And he responds, "Getting the phone number." Oh well, its interesting in the film for some reason.

And then there are an unending series of clever and surprising visual gags throughout the film that seem to have occurred by accident somehow. At other times there is visual lyricism and poetry. But this film never ever stops surprising you - by the end it is wowing us with technological wizardry because the depiction of the main character's flying machine is truly amazing. And as I indicated it is somehow, above all of this, a film about an actual real place -Houston Texas - and it has plenty of elements that would undeniably appeal to a lot of real good old boys from Texas - things like great sounding cars like Camaro Z28's and Roadrunners and car chases.

It is without question in the top five of Robert Altman's films and I never heard about it till last night. BIll Hader from Saturday Night Live was a guest on Turner Classic Movies and Brewster McCloud was one of four films he had selected as personal favorites of his that were shown. (The others were Rashomon, This is Spinal Tap, and something else. I had never seen all of Rashomon before either - its overrated.) But that old guy who is the standard host on TCM seemed mystified or something by Hader's choice of Brewster McCloud, but regardless, its a really, really memorable film.

Bud Cort is the title character, an eccentric oddball secretly living in the Houston Astrodome who believes he has figured out how to fly like a bird. He is protected by a guardian angel (Sally Kellerman) with clipped wings. He then becomes a suspect in a series of murders of people who are found strangled and covered in bird droppings.

An aggressively quirky counterculture time capsule, many modern viewers will be turned off by the bizarre story and outre characters. I happen to like it, and rank it among Altman's best. I enjoy the cast of weirdos, from Shelley Duvall (in her debut) as a stock-car driving tour guide who falls for McCloud, to Michael Murphy playing a San Francisco "supercop" named Shaft who sports turtlenecks and piercing blue eyes, to Margaret Hamilton as one of the murder victims who is found wearing ruby slippers. Stacy Keach is unrecognizable under heavy old age make-up, playing a miserly parody of Howard Hughes.

It's hard to talk about a film as unparalleled as Brewster McCloud. It creates its own world out of element from the world we know so well. It plays with everything, including its self-consciousness about being a movie. It weaves together many threads into a lovely, heart-breaking snapshot of a moment in America.

The situation: The world has gone mad. The wicked witch is wearing the Ruby slippers, and has become a beloved social icon. Who wouldn't want to fly away?

Enter Brewster McCloud, a young man who plans to do just that. He is hiding out in the basement of the Astrodome in Houston, working on building his wings. The kind you wear. Like Icarus did. His plan is all feeling, very focused, but doesn't take him past the immediate "How?" He is under the tutelage and protection of a sort of Bird-Goddess/Angel (played by Sally Kellerman) who walks around wearing absolutely nothing but a red plastic raincoat. When she takes it off, you can see the long, curving scars where her wings were removed. She also drives around in a small red car whose license-plate reads "BRDSHT".

Lest you think I've given away too much, let me assure you this barely scratches the surface. Who is responsible for the wave of mysterious murders? What of the presidential candidate who's all over town, is he an assassination target? What is the connection with the horny young girl (Shelly Duvall, in her first movie role - I believe she was discovered by Altman when he attended a party at her house during the location shoot in Houston) who comes to visit Brewster but can't ever really get his attention?

A wonderful, under-rated film worth seeing.

This film, televised in Denmark in the mid-seventies, made a great impact on me. The story of Brewster and his dream of flying was wildly funny and poignant. And why it has become so obscure makes me wonder. I have been hoping for an opportunity to see it again. It is truly a great film as is the instructor Robert Altman!