Absolutely Fantastic

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I guess since "The Odd Couple" was already taken as a title, Robert Altman decided "A Perfect Couple" instead. This film seems about 10 years behind the times in its story of a young woman (Marta Heflin) involved with a seemingly hippie "Up With People!" type singing group who meets the portly Paul Dooley and their strange encounters while dealing with the others' eccentric groups and family and just trying to find time to learn about each other. Another missed opportunity for a potentially challenging emotional film about less than perfect people seeking happiness in a relationship, "A Perfect Couple" is just bizarre. Heflin, who is a cross between Shelley Duvall (an Altman regular), Olive Oyl (whom Duvall would play the following year) and Laraine Newman, isn't unattractive, but her character really isn't all that interesting. Dooley, too, has some issues. While I don't mind a film focusing on the usual supporting characters trying to be a leading player rather than a character type, I just never found myself interested in their situations, mainly because they really seem to be too distant as people to really care about.As far as the actors, I did like the fact that the majority of the cast is made up with unknowns. Of the cast, I only knew Dooley (of "Breaking Away" fame), Henry Gibson, Dimytra Arlyss and Dennis Franz; The rest of them to me were totally unfamiliar, so I did feel like I was watching something fresh on that perspective. Of those unknowns, Titos Vandis stood out as Dooley's tyrannical papa, and after researching his credits, I will certainly look for him in his other work. Two scenes that will probably remain in my memory are where Dooley and Heflin are trying to be alone but are interrupted, first by Vandis and his disapproving family, and later in a hotel room by Heflin's freaky pals. For connoisseurs of Altman's work, this will probably be a curio, but for others, it might be a good idea to know the type of film you are getting yourself into.

I finally got around to seeing this for-many-years-as-good-as-lost Altman film, and I must say, I was extremely impressed. It is a highly unusual piece. Altman biographer Patrick McGilligan says "There is not another movie like it in the Altman canon," and he's not kidding; there is scarcely another movie like it in anyone's canon. The closest I can think of is George Romero's also criminally underrated There's Always Vanilla, which also deals with the arc of a romance between "ordinary" people with no touch of Hollywood iconography about them.The film is conceived in terms of a number of binaries: two families, a rigidly patriarchal Greek family and a rock music collective with its own sort-of-patriarch; classical music and pop music, which join hands in the climax; a "perfect couple" of two decidedly imperfect, non-glamorous people, and a near-silent "imperfect couple" of two glamor-pusses, whose path repeatedly crosses that of the perfect couple, but in ways that only the audience perceives. (The perfect couple meets through a video dating service that is a direct precursor to the Internet dating services of our own day; that lends the film an oddly timely-contemporary touch.)The rock music collective, Keeping 'Em Off the Streets, co-formed by Altman collaborator Allan Nicholls, actually existed and concertized a couple of times, but failed to win a recording contract. (The soundtrack was preserved on Altman's own Lion's Gate label; I recently scored a copy of this rare LP.) As many of the reviewers here at the IMDb enthuse, the music is quite delightful, and rather difficult to pigeonhole, with rock, pop, jazz, and theater music elements. There are a lot of musicians, a lot of singers, a lot of people (and even a dog) just hanging around, in somewhat elaborate and rather magical spaces (courtesy of master designer Leon Ericksen), and the musical numbers seem to emerge from the ambiance. The film is very driven by the songs.Adding to the flavor of A Perfect Couple is a remarkably casual-positive attitude toward several gay and lesbian characters, so much so that Vito Russo singled the film out in his book The Celluloid Closet as being "special" for its era in its recognition of a "happy, well-adjusted" lesbian couple as a "family."In the lead roles, Paul Dooley is remarkably winning, and Marta Heflin has a mysterious, somewhat withdrawn quality that suddenly announces itself forcefully in her one solo number, "Won't Somebody Care", which is also one of the great musical sequences in all of movies, if you ask me -- right up there with Keith Carradine's "I'm Easy" in Nashville.The next forgotten Altman film that needs to be rehabilitated is H.E.A.L.T.H., which Helene Keyssar praises most interestingly in her book Robert Altman's America. I saw it only once many years ago and am eager to see it again.

"Nashville" represented a critical and commercial high point for Altman. He followed it with a series of films that puzzled the critics and alienated his already slender audience (the critics loved his overlapping dialogue and generally unhappy endings but audiences didn't). "Buffalo Bill and the Indians", "A Wedding", and worst of all, "Quintet".Altman was running out of studio backing and critical support. He had never really been a money maker and by 1979 with "Jaws" and "Star Wars" Hollywood had discovered the special effects summer blockbuster. It was tired of auteurs like him and Bogdanovich and Coppola, particularly auteurs who didn't make money (auteurs who remain the darlings of the critics like Woody Allen and Scorsese and don't cost too much money are OK.). Altman needed to show Hollywood that he could make money."A Perfect Couple" and "Popeye" were Altman's attempts to make movies he hoped would reach out to the general audience and be hits at the box office.

I loved this movie from the first time I saw it. Sure, it's basically a new take on Romeo and Juliet, but it's still a good flick. The music is undoubtedly the best part {especially when "Bobbie" sings 'Lonely Millionaire (swoon)}--if Keepin' 'Em Off the Streets were a real band, I'd be their biggest fan.Does anyone know how I might get a copy of A Perfect Couple?