A Surreal Story About 3 Women

Robert Altman’s 3 Women isn’t the weirdest film I’ve ever seen, but it’s possibly one of the weirdest I’ve ever seen under a big-studio banner. It was made by 20th-Century Fox in 1977, but was a bomb at the box office, and was never, ever released on home video. This year, however, the film was finally released on DVD... by the Criterion Collection --- clearly, even in 2004, Fox doesn’t give much of a damn about the film........

Sissy Spacek gets a job at a nursing home, and on her first day, is trained by Shelly Duvall, thus beginning a peculiar, bizarre, and sometimes harrowing story.

Immediately, we understand that there is something a little “off” about Spacek. It’s hard to put into words. It’s clear that she is young, and acts childlike. But childlike is nothing. Sure, she may act childlike, but it’s also kind of disturbing. There’s little that’s cute about it, as it isn’t so much that she’s childlike, but that her behavior is totally cut off from what is normal. The first obvious example of this is when the two women are in the pool, as Duvall attempts to teach her what is expected of her when she takes the old people into the pool.
Spacek is asked to play the role of one of the old people, as Duvall shows her some of the leg exercises and such that she will do with the old people that she assists. But Spacek, for some reason, overdoes it, pretending to be helpless to the point that she dunks herself under the water -- and stays under long enough to simultaneously frighten and embarrass Duvall. Of course, Spacek finds all of this funny.

Later on, the two women go to a bar out in the desert, owned by a couple who also own the apartment complex where Duvall lives. When Spacek sees the long-abandoned mini-golf course alongside it, she acts like a giddy child as she says in awe, “Wow!! A miniature golf course!!” Inside the bar, Duvall buys a beer for Spacek, who chugs it down from top to bottom without stopping.

Spacek always seems to do or say something strange, odd, embarrassing -- especially so to Duvall, who doesn’t quite know what to make of her. And it soon becomes more disturbing, after Spacek becomes Duvall’s roommate.

Inevitably, Spacek finds a way to become closer to Duvall, who pins up a notice on the bulletin board seeking a new roommate. Immediately, Spacek takes the notice, and then we see her getting aquatinted with the apartment. Duvall is hopeful that things will work out well even with such a strange girl as a roommate, but of course they do not.

Spacek begins to root through Duvall’s personal life. She goes through her diary. She wears Duvall’s clothes without permission. And she basically just annoys Duvall with all her weirdness. Duvall is annoyed, as well, because she wants Spacek to be a normal girl (although Duvall’s version of an attack on normalcy seems to be summed up by her telling her that “You don’t drink, you don’t smoke or anything else that you’re supposed to.”). The final straw is when she kicks Spacek out of the bedroom so Duvall can share it for the evening with a man -- the man who owns the apartment complex.

Spacek immediately stumbles onto the balcony, and attempts suicide by jumping into the pool. It doesn’t work -- although she falls into a coma after being sent to hospital. Duvall, with feelings of hurt and guilt, tries to make things right, so she tracks down her parents. But the result is something less than satisfactory, at the very most. And once Spacek is well enough to be sent home, things become more and more odder, until the very end..........

Is there a selling point to this film? 3 Women captures a mood more than a plot, and most viewers will either be bored stiff, or they’ll just think it too weird and confusing. The plot description doesn’t fully describe the way this movie works. This is, quite simply, a movie that moves on its own time, that follows its own rules, that has little interest in satisfying a popcorn audience. In short, it’s the kind of movie that a big studio doesn't’ make, which is probably why Fox essentially suppressed it for so long. Instead of a quick pace, Altman gives us a documentary-like portrait of a skewed reality. The movie appears to be casual, with the typical feel of wandering into real life that occurs in most of the Altman films I’ve seen -- but this time, the real life is tinted with a quiet but always apparent strangeness. From the first frame to the last, nothing is quite right.

The women are very interesting creations. If I may be so immodest, I’d say that these types of women are sorts that I would have been proud to create. They seem like the sort of screwed-up women that would probably find a home in my fiction, up to a point, at least.

Spacek is strange, no doubt about it. Some of the things that she does are never explained -- such as the few shots in which we see her get dressed into a gown, before taking her underwear off (The shots call attention to themselves, so obviously we’re supposed to think something, right?). Like I said, she acts like a child, but it’s disturbing, not cute.

Duvall is supposedly “normal”... but she isn’t. Her whole life is one big delusion. She portrays herself as being hot stuff, the sort of woman who gets hot dates with guys, especially doctors, but in actuality, I don’t think she has any life at all. This becomes depressingly apparent in all the scenes in which she talks to other people. She never actually carries on a conversation with them -- she will be walking behind the other nurses at the home, talking about stuff, all while the people in front of her are trying to carry on their own conversation, with only a very occasional phrase in her direction. There’s points where the group will walk in a completely different direction, as Duvall is still talking!

Duvall’s flirtation with the doctors across the street is much the same way. They pretty much ignore her. And her supposed “friends” at the apartment complex, the ones who hang around the pool all the time, also ignore her, and think she’s a big joke.

Even so, Duvall always gives the impression to Spacek that she’s this popular young woman, fun loving and fancy-free.

There’s a third woman (naturally, since the movie is called 3 Women) -- played by Janice Rule, she’s the wife of the macho owner of the bar and apartment building. She’s pregnant during the movie, and hardly speaks a word in this entire film. Instead, she works on her murals, of grotesque figures in the throes of violence. The battle in these murals are between male and female - the figures seem to be a mutation of grotesque versions of male and female humans and serpents. She paints these murals all across their properties, including the swimming pool where Spacek tries to drown herself. This mostly-silent woman plays a stronger part during the film’s bizarre climax.

*major spoilers*

While I won’t reveal the last scene, I’ll definitely reveal the point where it seems clear that Spacek is stealing Duvall’s personality, which comes about most fully as Spacek awakens from her coma. A lot of reviews compare this film to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, which deals with similar themes (although it’s been years since I’ve seen Persona, back when I was probably less “sophisticated” about these types of movies). In any case, Spacek and Duvall end up being psychological twins of a sort -- because Spacek tries to incorporate Duvall’s personality and behavior into her obviously empty psychic shell.

But what is interesting to me is that Spacek doesn’t so much copy Duvall’s personality as she copies the personality Duvall would like to have. It’s a bit of a rueful joke Altman plays on Duvall’s character as she discovers Spacek partying it up with the guys around the pool. Spacek actually is living the life that Duvall wanted to live - she’s actually gaining the friends that Duvall tried to get. Yet Spacek did copy Duvall’s persona, in a way -- since I’m sure that Spacek, naive child that she is, really did think that Duvall was the hot stuff that she deluded herself into thinking she was.

3 Women is a strange film. It is both completely understandable, and utterly enigmatic. It’s not as if the characters are from another planet -- even Spacek is of an oddness that I’m sure we’ve all seen once in our lives. The stuff they say and do sound like life -- since life does include both normalcy and eccentricity. But the end result is baffling. The last sequence is the most strangest you’ll ever see --- seeming more likely in a surrealist art film than in a film made in Hollywood. But all of this adds to the film’s mystique. I don’t know if I really like this film yet, but it’s surely intriguing. When I first saw it a few years back, I thought it was weird enough that it was a really fine movie. This time,
the superficial mystery of it went away, to be replaced with a simple reminder of what this film is all about. I don’t think I actually liked it a whole lot more this time. But I’m sure that if I were to watch it a third time, I would be able to uncover the deeper mysteries.