Kansas City (1996)

Like the films of Orson Welles, Federico Fellini or Woody Allen, there's almost always a reason to watch, even if the completed whole doesn't quite add up to the sum of it's parts. Kansas City fits that bill for me.Altman weaves his usual rich tapestry of lives affected by history in a city alive with jazz and political chicanery, and Kansas City is worth watching for the unexpectedly mesmerizing performance by Harry Belafonte as "Seldom Seen," mobster boss.The jazz on display is equally dazzling, but just when your mind is settling into some rich, heady music, the film cuts back to the deadly, mannered, whiny performance turned in by Jennifer Jason Leigh; when most film fans recall the disaster that became Godfather III, the director's indulgence of the lackluster performance turned in by Sofia Coppola comes to mind; Leigh's performance similarly affects the tone of Kansas City, and since she is the protagonist, the film's interest flags with her director-free indulgence in some kind of method acting that fails to evoke much but self-indulgence.In short, Kansas City is well worth a look for superb mise-en-scene,for the music and atmosphere, but is deeply frustrating for it's central performance.

I'm sorry but this movie was pitiful. I hated it. KC is S-L-O-W, B-O-R-I-N-G, crap. The dialog was laughable, trite and completely unbelievable. This is a bland thirty-minute short story stretched out to almost two painfully excruciating hours. The only good qualities in this waste of celluloid were 1. Great costumes and 2. Fabulous period cars. Where did they get all of those great old cars? CAUTION - This film is for jazz lovers only....and I hate jazz. How bad can it be? If YOU like this crap-fest, then help yourself to my DVD copy. I threw my disk in the trash. It'll be out at the county dump by now (where it belongs). 1 star out of 10

The music is superb. The movie is so-so. The period sets are perfect and its just like being back in KC during the infamous Pendergast era. Altman made this movie as a paean to his hometown and the music that came out of it. One cannot divorce the music from the movie. Either you are a jazz fan or you're not. If you're not, you won't like this movie. Its that simple. If you are, you are really in for a treat. The film features all of the "new" stars in jazz from the mid-90's (James Carter and Craig Handy on saxes, Mark Whitfield on guitar, Geri Allen and Cyrus Chestnut on piano....the list goes on and on. They all play the legends of jazz that came out of Kansas City-people like Count Basie, Joe Williams, Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins. A veritable treat for the in-the-know jazz fan but probably a bore for anyone else. Altman stays on the music longer than most directors would because this is a film about the music as much as it is about the plot. And here's the real irony. Movie buffs will say they wished Altman wouldn't have devoted so much time to the music and jazz buffs will say they wished Altman would have done away with the ridiculous, annoying plot and grating performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh and focused entirely on the music. How to please everyone? The end result is uneven but there's enough here to keep all parties interested.If any actor should be singled out, it should be Harry Belafonte. His turn as the underworld kingpin, Seldom Seen, is fantastic. He speaks in a low, gruff rasp but his dialogue is truly worth the effort to understand. When he goes off on the Marcus Garvey speech, its worth the price of admission. Of course, it helps to know who Marcus Garvey was. Jazz fans (and reggae fans, too) will get it. After all, this is a movie for them/us.

I'm not convinced that this film is not more well-respected just because director Robert Altman's name is attached. Show Kansas City to your average casual film-viewer without letting them know who directed, or you can even let them know, if they're not cineastes and do not know Altman, and I think the average opinion would be much lower. That's not to say there are no positive qualities to the film, but it is far more burdened with flaws, and it's more likely to ultimately annoy rather than entertain.The story is of course set in Kansas City, during the depression. Blondie O'Hara (Jennifer Jason Leigh) enters the home of socialite Carolyn Stilton (Miranda Richardson) under false pretenses (she says she's there to give Mrs. Stilton her normal manicure) and ends up pulling a gun on her. Mrs. Stilton figures it's just your run-of-the-mill robbery, but O'Hara wants something else. O'Hara's husband, Johnny (Dermot Mulroney), has gotten himself into trouble and Mrs. Stilton's influential husband, Henry (Michael Murphy), an adviser to President Roosevelt, can help him out.Let me mention the positive aspects of the film first, because otherwise I'll likely run out of room. The primary asset is the film's music. Because of the setting, including that a lot of the film takes place in a black jazz joint, the "Hey Hey Club", the music is jazz during its transitional phase between swing and early bop--heck, even a young Charlie Parker (Albert J. Burnes) is in the film, although the setting has Parker too young to be shown performing (and Parker turns out to be irrelevant to the film). But it does have musicians playing Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Count Basie, and the musicians who perform throughout the film read like all all-star roster of contemporary jazzers, including David Murray, Joshua Redman, David "Fathead" Newman, Ron Carter, Christian McBride, Geri Allen and Victor Lewis. The music is excellent if you're a jazz fan, as Altman must be.The other asset is that production designer Stephen Altman, the director's son, does an excellent job getting the period setting right. Especially if you're into classic cars of the era, the film will be a treat to watch, but all of the details seem right. The cinematography isn't bad, either.However, even as good as the music is, it just doesn't work within the context of the film. Most of the musicians can't act but try to. Maybe it's that they weren't directed very well by Altman. He features them on camera too much, and even lingers on them for relatively long songs. A concert film featuring the band would have been great. In the middle of a dramatic film, these shots just feel like padding with bad acting.The story itself, although relatively simple--too simple, perhaps, is chopped up and told as if it's going to have some big revelation or twist. Altman keeps unnecessarily jumping back and forth in time--but just a few hours, and he keeps unnecessarily jumping back and forth between different sets of characters in the middle of (very) long scenes. I guess he realized the scenes were too long and needed to be broken up. The scenes should have been cut back instead. More should have happened. Far too often, scenes feel like they're stretched out with pointless dialogue just to increase the film's running time.And the dialogue isn't just pointless. It's loaded with non-sequiturs. I've never experienced laudanum or known anyone who has, but one of the characters, shown as a laudanum user, regularly speaks gibberish. At least that seems to be the excuse for it. It turns out that everyone in the film routinely speaks gibberish as if they're on some kind of heavy drugs. Not every line is like that, but enough are that it's relatively inexplicable. The plot in general has a lot of non-sequiturs. It seems almost as if Altman, who co-wrote the script with Frank Barhydt, was shooting for some kind of bizarre surrealism, except that surrealism seems so out of context for the setting and basic gist of the film, and it's too understated to seem intentional. I just don't get why people in the film would speak and behave so oddly.Then there are the performances. I've liked Jennifer Jason Leigh in some films--I absolutely love eXistenZ (1999) for example, and she certainly can act like "someone other than herself", which a lot of people seem to use as one of the main criteria for "good acting", but her character here is so annoying that I couldn't wait for the film to be over. She bizarrely barks out her dialogue in a grating accent. When I thought of it upon waking up this morning with my review gelling in my head (I usually watch films at night then think about them while I head off to sleep--reviews often pop up almost fully formed when I awake), I burst out laughing remembering the character. It's something I'd more expect from an alien sketch on a show like MadTV or Saturday Night Live. Imagine Prymatt Conehead with a sour and somewhat hyper Brooklyn attitude.Harry Belafonte, as the ridiculously named "Seldom Seen", also tended to be annoying--and he probably has more lines than anyone else but Leigh. A number of other characters were primarily annoying, too. The only one I really didn't mind was Miranda Richardson, despite the gibberish, and she's also gorgeous, so she's a treat to watch.There are a couple good sequences, but they tended to be those focused on "action"--when characters were up and about, doing something rather than sitting in a room and talking, and the climax was great (I even cheered). Unfortunately, those sequences were few and far between. The majority of the film just seems flat and drawn out. My advice is to just buy the soundtrack; avoid the film.