JACK TANNER,"FOR REAL"

Vote, vote, vote for Garry Trudeau and Robert Altmans cable candidate

Mixed Media

JAMES WOLCOTT

The TV mini-series has been rapidly becoming a royal stable for clotheshorses, a fancy-dress ball where Jane Seymour or Jacqueline Bisset parade proud, jeweled bosoms against a panoramic backdrop of smoke and conquest, their cleavage a seismograph for civil strife. Upheaval in the streets— upheaval in their caged hearts! Without intending to, the director Robert Altman and the creator of "Doonesbury," Garry Trudeau, have combined to reanimate this soapy genre by making it fast, newsy, and affordable. They've broken the gridlock on the ballroom floor, warehoused the mannequins in period costume. Shown in continuing chapters on HBO, Altman and Trudeau's Tanner '88 is a cross between a movie serial and a comic strip, but it isn't stocky or stiff-jointed (as Trudeau's cable-TV parody of Reagan, Rap Master Ronnie, was). It's fluid, mindful, fly-eyed.

Directed by Altman and written by Trudeau, Tanner '88 is about Democratic hopeful Jack Tanner—Michael Murphy—and his spotty quest for the presidency. Shot and edited on video (and Altman has adapted to video more ably than Godard or Antonioni), Tanner '88 reflects the influence of the publicaffairs cable system, C-SPAN. Where the nightly news reduces speakers to pithy "sound bites," C-SPAN hiphops the nation to videotape an entire speech or symposium with all its dead air intact. It's a giant tracking device—Have Camera, Will Travel. (The first time I tuned in to C-SPAN, there was poor Gary Hart in Iowa, pitching his foreign policy at a place called Hoppy's Diner.) C-SPAN's appeal is that it allows viewers to watch hearings, speeches, and debates unchaperoned, without "expert" commentary or glitzy graphics superimposed to frame a proper response. It's the TV equivalent of a transcript.

Like C-SPAN, Tanner '88 shuns production values (budgeted at $700,000 per hour, it's far cheaper than the madefor-HBO movies The Tracker and Baja Oklahoma) in order to be portable and mobile. Running a shadow campaign, Altman's cast and crew have taken their act on the road from New Hampshire to Nashville, the location shooting giving the series a quilted layer of documentation. In its travels Tanner '88 straddles the chasm between the small but stalwart core of C-SPAN junkies fixated on the nuts and bolts of inside politics and the vast mass of American voters and nonvoters who can barely sort through the blur.

That blur is at the heart of the humor. "I'm probably gonna vote for Du-dakis," a farmer tells Tanner, who amiably cracks, "Well now, you don't want to vote for a guy unless you know his name." Part of the fun of Tanner '88 is watching Altman and Trudeau play Pirandello with their political charade. In his jostle for name recognition, Tanner handed a campaign button to Bob Dole, joshed with Gary Hart and Pat Robertson, solicited advice from Bruce Babbitt. He even popped up like Woody Allen's Zelig in an ABC report by Brit Hume on the campaign. This confounding of fake and real gives Tanner '88 a fudgy center, for all its flightiness. The slogan of Tanner's campaign is "For Real," and the hepcat creator of Tanner's media ads refers to his style as "neorealism." Neorealism in this context doesn't mean what it meant in Italian cinema: gaunt faces and poverty, Anna Magnani in black. The neorealism of Tanner '88 is slick minds using a rough format to package a slick message. This represents a political and aesthetic shift from Reaganism, which uses slick methods to put forth a slick message. From the old Hollywood school, Reagan prizes production values—he's a superrealist. Tanner's neorealism is the recognition that the Reagan boom is over and it's time to Face the Future. Warts-and-all is how Tanner presents himself to the electorate. If Reagan is the Teflon president. Tanner is the Plexiglas candidate. "For Real."

Tanner '88 isn't Altman's first foray into the factoidal interface of media and politics. Assassination shot a hole into the heart of the New South in Nashville. He did a new version of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial for CBS modeled on the steady drone of the Irancontra hearings. He is also the director of a brilliant and little-seen spookhouse comedy called Secret Honor, in which a rancid and bitter Richard Nixon (Philip Baker Hall) delivers an acid soliloquy that is his stab at self-exoneration. Caustic and eerily controlled, Secret Honor succeeds not only as a mood piece but as a macabre parody of those one-man shows about former presidents (such as James Whitmore's rendition of Harry S. Truman). In Secret Honor, Nixon portrays himself as a small vampire feasted upon by big vultures. His office is his crypt and the movie is his night of the living dead.

If Secret Honor was Altman's look into the soul of Republican conservatism, that cavity of coiled vendettas and cobra venom, Tanner '88 is a rummage sale of the leftover ideals of Democratic liberalism. The blue skies and banners of Camelot are now lost in half-lights and doubt. There is a sense of stasis and stalemate, of sinking in syrup. But Altman's camera, in constant motion and surveillance, stirs the syrup. Liberalism may be stuck, but he isn't.

His signature moves are marvelous— camerawork is Altman's calligraphy. When Tanner's mistress sneaks out of a hotel, the camera tracks her black stockings and high heels skittering through the snow, the shot unfurling like a scroll, crow's-feet of ink on white paper. Most of the time, however, Altman bores in like a safecracker. The first in-

stallment of Tanner '88 opens with the camera examining the surface of a glass table, noting its matchbooks and coffee cups, and ends with Tanner being surreptitiously filmed from under the glass as he explains why he's running for president, his face fishily obscured by his own campaign posters—his image competing with itself. In the second episode, Tanner's impassioned, impromptu speech is a paid political spot seen in the background on a barroom TV as Altman's camera noses across the top of a pinball machine. And by the time he gets to Washington, the camera is panning across the flowers and dishes of a place setting at a posh reception. This is no mere flourish or stalling tactic on Altman's part, this fetishistic concern with objects and their refraction.

Without being pretentious about it, Tanner '88 scrutinizes the McLuhanesque multiplication of images within a monitored society. In the age of video, the past is rewind, the future is fast forward, and the present is unedited tape. To be a candidate is to swim or drown in a wavy sea of transmission. Tanner's staff knows this even better than Tanner. His chance encounter with Robert Dole

is analyzed later to show him how to be more "presidential." There are computer graphs on-screen, TVs fizzing with snow, a test ad which shows him taking a tough stance on drugs as his media director exults, "Is that tough? Are those balls that clank?" This overlapping of visual riffs is not only ingenious but serves as a distancing device. As Paul Coates observes in The Story of the Lost Reflection, "People in Altman's films are so often seen through glass, in mirrors. . .that they become ghostly: sliding away when the camera moves, like specks on a sliding door." If one were doing a thesis on Robert Altman, the title might be "The Treacheries of Transparency." Because no matter how closely Altman's characters are scrutinized, they remain unknowable. Their mystery can't be peeled.

Tanner himself is a minor enigma. As Tanner, Michael Murphy isn't so much a speck on a sliding door as a crinkled leaf lofted in a breeze. Politically spawned during the heady surge of campus activism and civil-rights protests in the sixties, Jack Tanner is a-twitter with the hopes and disquiets of thirtysomethings. He's the generational candidate envisioned by Pat Caddell—the man to fill the passion gap. Like Gary Hart and Albert Gore, he sets his jaw to the challenges ahead and strives to be Kennedyesque. Being Kennedyesque has become such a cliche that the word wears quotation marks ("I don't want to use the word 'Kennedyesque,' but he looks young and relaxed"—a campaign official on A1 Gore in The New York Times), and Murphy's coup is that he wears those quotation marks like flight wings. He's having fun in the role, and the fun emerges in the increments of charm he distributes in public and his shock-horror reactions to the antics of his staff. (He gives one underling a look that is pure death ray.) Murphy, who played the advance man for a candidate in Nashville, uses his lanky stride and suspicious eyes to make himself a quotation of a quotation. It's as if he were a photocopy of Robert Redford acting "Kennedyesque" in The Candidate.

The point of The Candidate was that Redford's character was so busy running that he had no idea what to do once he was elected. "What do we do now?" he asked. In Tanner '88 that point is more ambiguous. Do Tanner's balls clank on

the issues, or is he simply a vague vacuum of all the right instincts—the man in a moving suit? Difficult to say. When Tanner addresses his staff in the speech taped from under the glass table, he begins with an anecdote about an interviewer asking who his favorite Beatle was, and at the close of an eloquent spiel he delivers the correct answer as if it were chiseled in stone: John Lennon. An awed silence follows. But invoking John Lennon as the prince of peace is as ritualistic for a generational politician as paying homage to Bruce Springsteen—it hardly sets Tanner apart. Alert and glib as Tanner is, he never rises above platitude and consensus. He isn't Plexiglas. He's a tinted mirror.

Secret Honor aside, Altman movies have always been enmeshed by their ensemble work, and Tanner '88 is no exception. As Tanner's campaign manager, the pop-eyed Pamela Reed is the Laurie Anderson of political management, with a punky haircut and a bodiless fill to her tomboy slacks that suggests bones of air. Reed's T. J. Cavanaugh is the most earthbound, forthright Altman heroine ever, a whiplike antenna of inside wit and know-how.

One of the series's running gags is that a simpy Joe Kennedy keeps bugging her over the phone for advice on how to vote in Congress. "Listen, Joe," she says, rubbing a tired eyelid, "why don't you just go ask your uncle?" His uncle is, of course, Ted Kennedy. (This, hints Tanner '88, is what "Kennedyesque" has truly come to.) The Jimmy Olsen of the campaign is Stringer Kincaid (Daniel Jenkins), a would-be boy wonder who's always getting his boss into scrapes. Providing even larger comic relief is Andrea (liana Levine), an amiable mop of curls who drifts like a dingbat innocent through this mob of cynical smarties. When Tanner's staff is discussing the passion gap, someone says that what's needed is a white Jesse Jackson, and Andrea chimes in, "Or a black Bruce Babbitt." She then widens her smile to show her pony teeth, her childlike look inquiring, Did I make a funny? (A black Bruce Babbitt is a stunning conception.) The young actress Cynthia Nixon, who appeared onstage in Hurlyburly and was the best element in the movie The Manhattan Project, has a blond naturalness as Tanner's daughter that pours like shampoo. I only wish there were more of Veronica Cartwright, who looks spanking in her red jacket as a hotshot journalist.

Tanner '88 is semi-improvisational, which is both a strength and a peril. There are scenes scripted by Trudeau and situations in which the dialogue is ad-libbed. For the Washington episodes, the journalist Sidney Blumenthal helped organize a cocktail party in Chevy Chase in which Tanner met with the machers of the capital establishment. I can't agree with the Washington Post reporter who wrote that this soiree proved that when actors and nonactors collide "what happens is that the real actors don't do as well as the acting real people." Although it's clever seeing a fake candidate like Tanner getting advice from such real pundits as Blumenthal himself, Hodding Carter, Bob Squier, James Davidson, and Mary McGrory, the scenes had too much indecision and blab. McGrory, the marchioness of the Washington press corps, eyes the room in a twinkly way that lets you know that she's being a good sport and "playing along." And Blumenthal— what a striped-shirt smoothy!

It's true, as the Post reporter avers, that Altman's actors in the cocktail scene were comparatively mum, but that's the difference between actors and nonactors—actors know when to retreat and react, nonactors just keep on talking.

If I'm prejudiced in favor of actors, it's in part because Altman has shown what they're capable of. In Washington, Altman also shot a scene at a congressional hearing in which a reporter (Kevin J. O'Connor) who wobbles like a trained bear in an armysurplus coat plunks himself down next to Tanner's father, played by the veteran actor E. G. Marshall. Their conversation has the rhythm of a revue skit. (The scene makes one appreciate Trudeau's dialogue skills, his stealthy sense of beat.) In take after take, the turtlelike Marshall puts a distinctive wrinkle into his character's distaste. Hearing that the reporter is writing a book about his son's life, he replies, "A book?," spitting out the word as if it were a—uh, turd. That's something else actors have in spades. Enunciation. The real-life politicians and pundits add a newspapery texture to Tanner '88, but it's the actors who provide the party spirit.

As ringmaster, Robert Altman seems to have regained a measure of the equanimity he lost in Beyond Therapy, with its close-ups of Jeff Goldblum lowering

his mouth on Julie Hagerty's big toe and Tom Conti wetting his trousers in fright. He isn't in a pillaging mood. He's more laissez-faire. Asked how he could keep his cast and crew together for such a long haul (Tanner '88 plans to go all the way to the Democratic convention in Atlanta), Altman said that he was running it like a real campaign—if actors have scheduling conflicts, he'll lose them

The neorealism of Tanner '88 is slick minds using a rough format to package a slick message.

along the way and pick up fresh recruits. (Cynthia Nixon, for example, was also involved in doing Shakespeare for Joe Papp.) It's revealing that during the shooting Altman refers to his actors as "players," conjuring up with that antique term the vagabond days of touring companies in the provinces, pantomime, tents.

Altman is the most open of impresarios. Very few directors would allow a reporter to view the dailies, as Altman did. "I've got nothing to hide," he says, and it's not an empty boast. Unlike Orson Welles, he doesn't ally his art to magic and vaingloriously flap his cape. There's an absence of trickery in Tanner '88, and Altman claims that there's no hidden import to the series. "It's just a compilation of everything that's going on." But a compilation with a personal gloss. Since many viewers may have missed out on Tanner '88, HBO ought to consider running all of its episodes consecutively on Election Eve as an all-night orgy. That would be the supreme compilation—and maybe the supreme mini-series. □