The Long (Meandering) Goodbye

I watched The Long Goodbye directed by Robert Altman and starring Elliott Gould as famous pulp fiction private detective, Phillip Marlowe.

Like most of Altman's work, I found the movie slow and meandering, with more attention being paid to the incidentals and not enough on the actual art of telling the story. This makes it hard for me to "lose" myself in the film. Instead, I am paying too much attention to that which does not matter including Gould's "stream of consciousness" voice over and the unbelievably poor ADR of the actor's voices in post-production. I do understand that Altman is considered an auteur and I have tried to watch a number of his films but have had the same exact feeling; meandering with no connection to the characters on screen. In fact, I had more of an interest of what happened to Marlowe's cat and if he ever got Courry Brand cat food versus what happened to Terry Lennox or his wife.

I did find it funny that when I Google-searched the word meandering followed by Robert Altman, I came upon a number of articles that refer to his style of direction as such. It was also interesting to note that Terrance Malick is considered to have a similar meandering style. However, what I find to be the major difference is that the way that Malick uses cinematography to tell the story and push it forward so visually, it keeps the viewer engaged. The watching of Marlowe's female neighbors shot voyeuristically seemed for titillation purposes rather than any real intrinsic value to the story.