Tanner Redux

		Tanner Redux ‘Think Brave! Shoot Brave!! Be Brave!!!’ Jean-Pierre Coursodon

1. ‘Think Brave! Shoot Brave!! Be Brave!!!’ is the slogan that Alex has posted in her classroom and which she repeats to her students at the beginning of the series, when she sends them out shooting their own documentaries as their graduating assignment.

2. Altman managed to bring back his five main performers from Tanner ’88: Michael Murphy as Jack Tanner, Pamela Reed as T.J. Cavanaugh. Matt Malloy as Deke Conners, Ilana Levine as Andrea Spinnelli, and of course Cynthia Nixon as Alexandra Tanner, who, in the new series, moves to centre stage.

3. Appearing as themselves are: Harry Belafonte, Carl Bernstein, Steve Buscemi, Mario Cuomo, Ted Hartley, Elaine Kaufman, Dina Merrill, Robert Redford, Martin Scorsese, Al Sharpton (Episode 1); Gov. Gray Davis, Janeane Garofalo, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Art Tores (Episode 2); Madeleine Albright, Sen. Joe Biden, Gov. Howard Dean, Kitty Dukakis, Gov. Michael Dukakis, Al Franken, Richard Gephardt, Sen. Bob Graham, Alexandra Kerry, Chris Matthews, Michael Moore, Ron Reagan, Dee Dee Mayes (Episode 3); Harry Belafonte, Carl Bernstein, Chris Matthews, Richard Gephardt, Charlie Rose, Al Sharpton (Episode 4).

We’ve had The Three Musketeers returning in their sequel Twenty Years Later, the almost life-long Antoine Doinel saga and, more recently, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke together again in Before Sunset years after Before Sunrise. Generally speaking, however, coming across the same performers in the same roles after a long temporal gap is a rare experience. The gap was sixteen years for Robert Altman’s 2004 Tanner on Tanner mini-series, a mischievous and melancholy coda to his monumental and too-neglected (no doubt because it was ‘only’ television) twelve-episode HBO series Tanner ’88, in which he followed a fictitious Presidential candidate’s fictitious campaign in the context of the very real 1988 Presidential campaign. Tanner on Tanner revisits that past through the device (hence the title) of a documentary – My Candidate – which Alex Tanner (the candidate’s daughter, a student in 1988, now an impecunious indie filmmaker and teacher) (1) is directing about her father’s ’88 campaign and defeat. (2)

Altman (who stated in 1988: ‘In all my career I have never done anything this exciting’) and his irreplaceable accomplice Gary Trudeau relied again on a systematic mixture of fiction and reality, of actors playing parts and well-known personalities playing themselves. (3) Most of the series takes place during the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston , which Alex is trying to incorporate into her film about her father. The main focus, however, is not on the campaign itself, or even on Jack Tanner, but on the media frenzy it generates and into which everybody seems to be engulfed. While Alex shoots her documentary one of her students follows her everywhere with a small digital camera to film her filming. All over the place shooting crews (film or television) busy themselves, run into each other’s spaces, and sometimes clash. In the second episode, in Boston , a young filmmaker approaches Alex and her producer and tells them: ‘We’re shooting a documentary about the documentarists, can we follow you?’ And he adds (a remark Altman himself has made in his interviews): ‘There are forty crews filming the convention’.

4. Tanner on Tanner was produced for Sundance and cable-cast on the Sundance Channel. Altman was luckier than in 1988 with Redford, whom he had unsuccessfully tried to enroll among the personalities playing themselves in Tanner ’88 (Tanner, should he be elected President, wanted to offer Redford the post of Secretary of the Interior; other choices for his cabinet were Ralph Nader as Attorney General, Gloria Steinem as Secretary of Health and Social Services, Studs Terkel as Secretary of Labor, and Art Buchwald as … US ambassador to France!).

In the first episode, Alex introduces a rough cut of her documentary in a festival of independent films devoted to ‘works in progress’, and encounters rather harsh criticism from the audience. Robert Redford, who is present among the spectators, (4) advises her to add conversations between her father and others politicians of his party, his ‘brothers in combat’. This is just what she will attempt to do, with limited success (the series could be subtitled ‘The Misfortunes of Alex’) throughout the Democratic Convention. Her frustrations provide much of the humor of Tanner on Tanner, Altman delighting in the character’s often bumbling enthusiasm (in some ways she recalls Geraldine Chaplin’s journalist in Nashville)and using to best effect the expressive resources of the always surprising Cynthia Nixon.

5. Improvisation seems to be as widespread in Tanner on Tanner as it was in the 1988 series, and it is often in those moments when the characters go on without having to bother with a written text that Nixon’s spontaneity comes through most felicitously. In one scene with her editor and her producer, in which Alex analyses shots of her father vituperating against Bush, Nixon really lives the action, she is Alex. In an obviously improvised moment, the ever-ebullient Andrea shouts to her, ‘You’re happy?!’ Alex, beaming, her eyes still glued to the screen, answers ‘Yes, I’m happy’ and quite unexpectedly, places the back of her hand on her cheek. It may be a miniscule detail, yet I cannot tire of watching that instinctive gesture coming from who-knows-where and who-knows-how to ‘signify’ a moment of jubilation.

Nixon is so much the character that, what with the chaotic improvisational ambiance, (5) one can easily forget that she is acting – a major contribution to the prevailing ‘impression of reality’. The slightest emotion immediately registers on her face. Hyperactive and borderline manic-depressive, Alex can just as well break down in tears in public because of criticism from a spectator, or utter screams of joy when she receives a credit card (‘Line of credit ten thousand dollars!’ she exults, embracing Andrea in wild ecstasy). Her best moments, however, are less showy: thus her simultaneously comical and moving efforts to wedge herself into a conversation from which she is clearly excluded (Al Franken and his assistant in the third episode). In one of the series’ best sequences, Alex appears with a small crew at an appointment she thought she had made with Ron Reagan. Actually, though, Reagan’s appointment was with another Alexandra – Alex Kerry, the daughter of the Democratic candidate – and on the phone he or an assistant had mistaken one daughter for the other. Alex T., who clearly should withdraw, proposes instead to participate in the interview. Reagan, who oozes charm, politely accepts, and so does Alex K., although without much enthusiasm. The ‘personal’ and anecdotal questions asked by Alex T. irritate the other Alex, who had prepared a series of ‘serious’ queries, and the atmosphere gradually deteriorates until Reagan, tactfully citing a previous engagement, excuses himself, to Alex Kerry’s dismay.

6. The scene recalls a somewhat similar incident in Tanner ‘88’s fourth episode, in which Alex drags her father to an anti-apartheid demonstration. Tanner is briefly arrested by the police, then released and questioned by TV reporters. He tries to sneak away, not wanting to be mistaken for an ‘extremist’ while Alex, to his acute embarrassment, makes blunt, fiery responses in his place.

Compromise, or worse, is what politics thrive on. Alex discovers it, to her own dismay, in the fourth and last episode, ‘The Awful Truth’ – an echo of Tanner ‘88’s closing episode, ‘The Reality Check’ – in which she is ‘betrayed’ by her own father and, in a different way, by her would-be documentarist student. Alex has shot her father’s impromptu tirade against Bush and the Iraq war – a violent diatribe she feels will provide her film’s best sequence. Jack Tanner, however, has been offered a Cabinet position (assistant Secretary of State) should Kerry become President. As a result, his diatribe against the war in Iraq becomes dangerous: those voters who still believe that the war has some reason for being shouldn’t be offended, so Tanner asks his daughter to drop the embarrassing scene from her film – a bitter reality-check indeed. After an initial reaction of indignant anger, Alex watches an interview with her father on television: Jack Tanner’s discourse has become pure cant, a fence-sitter’s careful platitudes, going so far as co-opting a Bush slogan (‘We must stay the course’). (6) Alex resigns herself to destroying her precious tape: she dumps it into a big pot in which Salim (Aassif Mandvi) was cooking an exotic brew. ‘But it’s your film!’ Andrea exclaims. ‘I don’t have a film’, Alex ruefully replies.

The other – even more personal – treason Alex suffers also involves a moment on film. Without telling her, Stuart (Luke McFarlane), her student, has inserted in his documentary an intimate conversation she had with him and which he had filmed without her knowledge. Writing about Tanner ’88 twenty years ago I noted the series’ ‘extreme variety of moods and modes, from documentary to whimsical, from comedy to drama, the comedy sometimes verging on slapstick, the drama on melodrama’. The remark applies just as well to Tanner on Tanner, despite the comparative briefness of the series (a total of barely two hours against the 358 minutes of Tanner ’88) which one would expect to reduce the range of registers. Tanner on Tanner’s most dramatic sequence is Alex’s monologue telling Stuart about the Nicaraguan journalist she had married three years earlier. He later mysteriously vanished, probably ‘disappeared’ (he was a reporter during the Civil War) -- ‘but there is no way to know for sure,’ she says. Most of the monologue is shot in a very slow tracking shot on Cynthia Nixon as she whispers, trying not to awaken the others (the scene takes place at night in a hotel room which serves as headquarter and dormitory for Alex’s crew) and becomes increasingly emotional as the camera closes in on her, finally saying matter-of-factly: ‘So there is no way to know, you know, whether I am a wife or a widow.’

When Stuart shows his own film to the class, Alex finds out that not only has he selected her most embarrassing or humiliating moments, but also included the surreptitiously filmed footage of her late-night confession. Unlike her father, she doesn’t ask the young man to drop the scene but storms out of the screening, angrily shouting at Stuart. ‘You needed me to be tragic, so I was tragic, Well done! A plus!’ Later he calls her to apologise and justify himself (‘The film is not for you, it’s about you’), but as he speaks on the phone he is filming himself with his camcorder, and his self-satisfied smirk tells us a lot not only about his cynicism, but more generally about the doubtful morality of cinema’s intruding in private reality, a recurring theme throughout both Tanner series.

In 1988, video companies were reluctant to distribute the series, arguing that the content was too topical to retain lasting interest. Watching Tanner on Tanner three years after its first broadcasting invalidates this objection. Politically, in the United States , things have not changed, except by getting worse. Tanner’s and Alex’s diatribes against Bush and the Iraq war are timelier than ever. The already ongoing campaign for the 2008 Presidential election (twenty years after Tanner ’88) echoes the 2004 campaign. Some of the political personalities who appeared in Tanner on Tanner can be seen almost daily on TV news shows: Altman’s clip from a now-famous 2004 speech by Barack Obama couldn’t be more topical at a time when the Senator from Illinois is on his way to the Presidential race as the Democratic nomination.

Clearly, then, a 2008 sequel to the series – one can always dream – would have been most timely. Back in ’88, Altman and his writer had their own dream to continue the series, making it a kind of filmic equivalent of Trudeau’s comic strip, but HBO declined. In June ’88, as he was putting the finishing touches to the last episode, Altman told me: ‘This far we haven’t been able to convince anybody’. The dream never came true, except for this delectable, belated appendix, although traces of it survive in Altman’s superb ‘testament’, A Prairie Home Companion (2006) – retitled, in sadly premonitory fashion, The Last Show for its French release (the relationship between Altman and his screenwriter Garrison Keillor is reminiscent of his relationship with Trudeau in ’88 and ’04) – a last show in which reality and fiction again mingle in a way that questions their increasingly elusive status.

This is a translation, by the author, of an essay originally published in the December 2007 issue of Positif. Just as Tanner on Tanner is a sequel to a much longer series, the essay is a sequel to a much longer piece on Tanner ’88 also published in Positif (November 1988).

		© Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Rouge 2008. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.