When I list “self-indulgent” among an artwork’s Cons, here on Epinions, that’s for customer service’s sake, not mine. A self-indulgent artwork risks being awful and embarrassing – risks it very strongly, in fact – but the other choices are to indulge Audience, or Market Research, or just Custom, and to risk being bland and condescending, which to me is worse. (Indulging friends is a useful midpoint, if they’re interesting friends: you gain perspective and don't throw away independence. But given how easy it is to discard inconvenient friends, I don’t know how far it differs from “self-indulgent” in practice.)

Of course, the downside risk in either case is more or less likely based on the artist’s talent. Director Robert Altman’s early-1970 hit M.A.S.H., written by the great humorist Ring Lardner, Jr., was both massively popular and gently quirky; it reduced plot to an emergency device, called on only when the clever dialogue needed a boost. “Suicide is Painless” was a depressing theme song, and the movie was set in a hospital in the pointless phase of a war that should have ended two years earlier, yet I don’t find its conversion to a sitcom at all strange: it wandered from event to event, and was all about how the characters treated each other on a day-to-day basis.

Perhaps that’s exactly why the movie was a hit. At any rate, for the rest of 1970, Robert Altman had earned the right to make whatever darn movie he felt like, without challenge. Brewster McCloud was the result; it sure couldn’t have happened any other way.

In one sense Brewster is a more traditional movie than M.A.S.H. was: it has a focused plot, and the main character’s goal will be reached or not by his own actions, where M.A.S.H.'s characters just waited to be called home. Brewster McCloud, played by Bud Cort (Harold from Harold and Maude), wants to fly. No, not like the “flying dream” of Peter from the Family Guy, where he’s sitting in a cramped seat being asked by the stewardess which drink he wants; Brewster is developing his arm muscles, and building the strap-on machine that will help him soar, personally, into the air and fly away.

He’s a smart, socially inept, and obsessive young man with thick glasses, so it’s not like he’d be abandoning anything he loves in his native Houston, where he lives in a fallout shelter under the Astrodome. “Away” would likely be his aim even if he got there through reading comic books and masturbating; it’s the “Up, up and” that gives his goal its power.

At the movie’s end, he will either succeed in flying, or he will try and fail, or he will back away from trying at all. There’s no other decent option, and we have a different fable with each possible choice. Altman’s task is to direct the events so that Brewster’s fate becomes the logical result of how he lived the movie; in my opinion, he succeeds. (Although there’s a gimmicky final scene which, while funny, is also built from Altman’s fear of committing to his choice.)

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I also listed “perverse” among the Cons, again in the spirit of consumer-guide objectivity. Some examples are small, such as when Brewster’s friend Hope involves him in a passionate sex scene, without Brewster noticing. Some examples are large, such as the framing device in which an absent-minded professor, played by the hook-nosed Rene Auberjonois, slowly turns into a bird while he lectures about their ways.

Most obviously, though, I mean Brewster’s mother, or perhaps just his mother-figure: Louise, played by Sally (“Hot Lips”) Kellerman. Brewster lives alone, but Louise is very guiding and very protective. She drives him in his quest for flight. She’s an adept and clever helper when he shoplifts: the scene in the camera store is well worth memorizing, if your personal version of capitalism is based on always paying the lowest price. She warns him away from the earthly attractions of girls, and given his deep blue eyes and powerful arm muscles, Hope isn’t the only one eager to attract him. Louise also strips nude and bathes Brewster, and to me it doesn’t seem any different from a mother bathing her 2-year-old ... the concern being that it doesn’t seem any different to her, either.

The “sadistic” I mention is also, in large part, Louise-related. She is a _very_ protective mother: when unpleasant people get in Brewster’s way, due to his illegal home or his easy-target looks, they have a way of dying, pecked to death and covered with bird droppings (BRD SHT being, indeed, Louise’s license plate). Maybe the red scars on Louise’s back, in the shape of wings, have something to do with it. Either way, it's our job to root for the nice, loving serial killer.

The story takes place in a Texas summertime, so it’s not like birdshiit needs outside assistance, but after awhile the deaths attract notice, and a cool-headed San Francisco cop named Frank Shaft is brought in to help solve the murders. This allows Altman to play games with police-procedural and buddy-cop films, with Houston’s own Officer Johnson as the deferential line cop who’s bowled over when new partner Shaft would rather unpack his clothes than meet, at once, with the Houston Police Chief. Shaft exudes a winning cockiness without ever inflecting his voice, such as when he chooses not to go to dinner with a town leader. “I have very influential friends!”, he’s bribed/ threatened; “Good, then they don’t need me around”, Shaft reasons, bored.

Altman isn’t _just_ gaming, by the way; there’s some insights into racism, and into police abuse of power, at the edges of some of these scenes. But you’re free to ignore them, or to just wait for the bad guys to get bright white poop in their eye.

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And, let’s see, I said Brewster McCloud was “amateurish”. The car chase is probably the worst moment: Altman has plenty of clever staging ideas, but not once do I believe that any of the drivers are really going over 30 miles per hour, and the efforts to pretend otherwise are so lame that they kill the scene. It is true that Bud Cort was cast without knowing how to drive – Brewster is a chauffeur by trade – but this is what stunt-people are for; even a funny car chase (as in F/X or What’s Up Doc?) should give us the energy to laugh by the simple whizzing thrill of man-look-at-them-GO! In failing, Altman also ruins the car chase’s couple of forays into spoof: it’s not a proper spoof if you can’t do better than the people you’re making fun of, and it’s pathetic not to know that.

Also amateurish is the excess of ditz jokes. They’re _good_ ditz jokes, some of them, like when Brewster’s friend Suzanne, discussing an old boyfriend, talks of him leaving to go into politics and muses “he must not’ve done very well: he’s only a Secretary”. Or when Officer Johnson, keeping a top-priority watch for the license plate DUV 222, peers intently at a car in front of him: “D... U... V... 2... 2..." (reading with blank patience, leaping to no conclusions), then “...2!” and the leap into excited understanding. Still, too many dumb characters can lend an aura of dumbness. Also, as far as Cindy or I can tell, one of the police scenes is slightly out of order, not like Tarantino but like "Oops".

But “amateurish” is not the same as “not talented”. It’s not even the same as “not brilliant”. Altman has a great eye for color and staging – such as a graveside scene, everyone dressed in solemn black, where a sudden rainstorm turns the funeral into a riot of bright yellow raincoats and pink and red umbrellas. The acting in Brewster is excellent: Cort’s intelligence and well-meaning hesitance, Kellerman’s calm furies and playful smugness and teacherly dictatorship, Auberjonois’s distracted dedication and growing bird-ness, Michael Murphy’s unshakeable calm as Shaft, Douglas Breen’s sleazy menace, and even the comic flair of the dumbbell roles.

Most important, of course, is the story. Brewster McCloud is, to my knowledge, the best movie about the quest for flight, the best movie about serial murder via birdcrap, the best movie about living alone under a domed stadium. It is, furthermore, a great movie about deciding whether to grow up; about deciding whether (and how) to deal with fellow human beings; about pursuing goals nobody understands.

The world we live in has been shaped and blessed by people every bit as crazy as Brewster: from the stats-obsessed dweeb who measured the carbon content of the Pacific air every day for fun (and thus discovered global warming), to a guy named Firestone, who wore dripping rubber costumes, and bankrupted family and friends in a silly and smelly quest to turn rubber into something usefully solid. Many other crazy people have colorfully accomplished nothing. But none of them are qualified to tell their own stories; it took an Altman, fluent in both Sane and Crazy, to translate and to build them their fable.

Recommended: Yes