If Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull's History Lesson is largely regarded as a failure, it's mostly because it had to follow Nashville, revisiting some of the same themes with less ambition and success. Again Altman is satirizing the American tendency to blur the lines between politics and celebrity, this time coinciding with the country's bicentennial year and skewering its penchant for mythologizing. All the same, it's not an uninteresting film (none of Altman's films, even his worst, are) and still feels relevant in an election year where no fact can stand in the face of bravado myths. "Truth is whatever gets the loudest applause," Paul Newman's Buffalo Bill Cody says at one point, and nothing feels more morbidly accurate while watching presidential debates. Still, the film tends to hammer home a single point and is uneven - the noble indians are stereotypes just as much as the scalping savages in the Wild West Show, and the scene where Sitting Bull wins over a raucous crowd with his quiet dignity is not only unbelievable but seems to let Bill's (and America's) audiences off the hook too easily.
3 Women is the most successful of Altman's "dream films," following That Cold Day in the Park and Images in its depiction of female characters suffering psychotic breaks and fracturing in mirrored surfaces. While those earlier films seem disconnected from the director's more male-centered and ensemble films, 3 Women hews a little closer in its wry satirical sense and its sense of women forming armored personalities in the face of their profligate men. Shelley Duvall's Millie is one of his (and her) most striking characters, a creation of self-help media whose insecurity is so severe that it curves completely around to become impenetrable self-confidence. It is in the end a mood piece, one that manages to be unsettling long before anything actually strange happens, and while less inscrutable than some critics claim is still an admirably ambiguous, impressionistic portrait of fluid identities. Every single person in the film seems to be a shadow of someone else: Millie of some idealized '70s "modern woman," Pinky (Sissy Spacek) of Millie. But even peripherally there are the twins and another pair of women always seen together at the geriatric spa where Pinky and Millie work; and Edgar (Robert Fortier), once Hugh O'Brian's stunt double. Willie (Janice Rule) is a singular figure, but barely more than an apparition, always silent, alone, and painting her strange, evocative murals.
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