The movie Short Cuts (1993) created special problems for the director, Robert Altman, in that he was attempting to unify a group of short stories into a coherent dramatic unit. Altman has accomplished this task before with movies like Nashville (1975), and that film is instructive as to the method used for Short Cuts given that the title of Nashville shows that the true star of the film is the city itself, just as in Short Cuts the city of Los Angeles becomes the central character. The various human characters in each are reacting to the milieu as much as to one another.
Altman brings together a group of stories by Raymond Carver, stories that were not otherwise connected in any way. They do not have the same characters, are not set in a specific place, and are not even found originally in the same anthology or collection. There is a book Short Cuts now that the movie has been made, but this is a collection which brings together the stories used in the film, taking them from their original place in a number of collections by Raymond Carver and putting them together in written form for the first time. The connections between the stories relate to theme, for most of Carver's stories deal with people trying to achieve some small success in their lives and failing. The incidents are small--a man tries to lose a dog because his family likes it and he does not; a man on a fishing trip finds a dead body and tells his wife about it; and so on.
The Carver stories are not set in Los Angeles as is the movie but in an unnamed American landscape where the characters interact in a rather dead fashion, as if they had had much of their inner life drained out of them. This made the translation to film even more difficult, and Altman has infused the filmic characters with a stronger life than they had on the printed page even when that may be a detriment to the themes embodied in those stories by Carver. In fact, the combination of ...