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List Price: $39.95 | | Label: Criterion
Salesrank: 26609
Released: April 20, 2004 |
| Our Price: $24.37 |
| Used Price: $19.42 |
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MPAA Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
In a dusty, under-populated California resort town, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), a naive and impressionable Southern waif begins her life as a nursing home attendant. There, Pinky finds her role model in fellow nurse "Thoroughly Modern" Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall), a misguided would-be sophisticate and hopeless devotee of Cosmopolitan and Woman's Day magazines. When Millie accepts Pinky into her home at the Purple Sage singles' complex, Pinky's hero-worship evolves into something far stranger and more sinister than either could have anticipated. Featuring brilliant performances from Spacek and Duvall, Robert Altman's dreamlike masterpiece, 3 Women, careens from the humorous to the chilling to the surreal, resulting in one of the most unusual and compelling films of the 1970s.
Description of 3 Women - Criterion Collection:
"The cinema," Orson Welles famously noted, "is a ribbon of dream." 3 Women is one of few feature films on record as having taken form in a dream. The dreamer was Robert Altman, and although all his best work has an oneiric quality--the floaty zooms, the eerie pastels bleeding into one another, the slip and slide of characters' trajectories overlapping in the fluid accumulation of what passes for narrative--this last masterpiece in his amazing seven-year run of 1970s masterpieces is only more so. Shelly Duvall, that most unorthodox of Altman creatures, locks in the tone with her eerie portrayal of Millie Lammoreaux, a Texan hoyden whose nonstop prattle turns life into a stream-of-consciousness reverie even as most of the people in her vicinity studiously ignore her. Her primacy is worshiped, then emulated by a strange, certifiably dysfunctional childwoman named Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek) who comes to work in the same old-age home as Millie, moves in with her, and progressively usurps her lifestyle and finally her identity. The third woman, Willie (the late Janice Rule), is a pregnant artist who paints reptilian humanoid figures on the floors of swimming pools. Willie's husband (Robert Fortier), a strutting gun nut who once had a bit part on TV's Wyatt Earp ("He knows Hugh O'Brian"), is just about the only male character of consequence in the film. This macho man gets his--but what "his" may be is only one of the movie's beguiling mysteries. It's only appropriate that the cameraman, Chuck Rosher, should be the son of the man who photographed F.W. Murnau's Sunrise. --Richard T. Jameson
3 Women - Criterion Collection Reviews:
Avant-guard film about female friendships. 
2009-12-27 - Three Women was another Robert Altman masterpiece. His films have always deeply explored the frailties, of the human personality. And Three Women is typical of Altman's deftness, regarding intense characterizations.
This film takes place in the late 70s, in a remote California town. It revolves around three very different female characters, and the effects that each of them has on each other's lives.
Shelley Duvall is cast as Millie. Millie is an intensely garrulous woman. She's obsessed with talking about recipes, that she garners from women's magazines. She annoys those around her, with her constant chatter about her 'latest recipe'.
Millie also desperately wants to impress her male acquaintances. Men seem to mostly shun Millie though, which doesn't stop her from trying to gain their attention.
Millie has a dead-end job, working as a nurse's aid in a nursing home. Her supervisors are brusque, and unsympathetic. She tries to be friendly and helpful, but this often causes her more problems with her bosses.
Pinky (played by the very talented Sissy Spacek) moves to Millie's town. She needs a job and is hired as a nurse's aid, at the same nursing home that Millie works at. Millie is assigned to train Pinky in her new job duties. Pinky soon becomes quite attached to Millie.
Finally, Millie has someone around (Pinky), who actually admires her. When Millie posts a notice on the bulletin board at work , indicating that she seeks a roommate, Pinky is only to happy to get the chance to room with Millie. Pinky then moves into Millie's apartment. Though Millie's apartment has a tacky, garish quality, Pinky expresses how sublime she thinks it is.
One afternoon after work, Millie asks Pinky to go with her to a run-down bar. Pinky meets Millie's friend Edgar, who has set-up a shooting rink out back. He constantly practices shooting there, and invites Millie and Pinky to participate. Edgar is a sophomoric, macho-type, who drinks heavily. He also likes to show-off his marksmanship skills.
Millie also introduces Pinky to Willie, who happens to be Edgar's artist girlfriend. Willie is always painting monstrous, sexually explicit creatures around the bar. Pinky is, inexplicably, mesmerized by Willie's offbeat paintings.
Willie has a haunting, remote presence. She mostly watches everyone else from afar, while being intensely involved with her artwork. Willie also happens to live in the same apartment building, as Millie and Pinky. Her disturbing paintings, adorn the bottom of the swimming pool located there.
Basically, the film doesn't have much of a plot. At least not in the traditional, linear manner that audiences are accustomed to. Instead, Altman chose to focus on the psychological aspects of the relationship between the three woman, and how this changes over time.
The friendship between Pinky and Millie becomes tumultuous, for no obvious reason. Willie is the ethereal, mysterious woman of the three. She doesn't interact much with Millie and Pinky throughout the film. Willie's artwork is so hypnotic to Pinky though, that it has a horrible effect on Pinky's psyche, resulting in tragic consequences. The viewer is left to try and fathom why.
All three women in the film, are social misfits. And they each struggle pathetically to function in the alienating, urban environment that they inhabit. Altman did a marvelous job, highlighting the emotional turmoil that the women inflict on each other, during the course of the film.
This is a film that will leave a deep impression, regarding the dynamics of women's friendships in modern life. But don't expect a neat and tidy conclusion, to the conflicts between the three women. More than any film I've ever seen, this one is vastly open to viewer interpretation.
UNIQUE 
2009-08-31 - fly on the wall view of human behavior. i won't go into details of the story. the real excitement is how these women see themselves and others. in a truly feminized society, younger women would still look to pop culture or each other on how to behave. stronger women would dominate both men AND women. truly eliminating the norm of male provider, protector, and head of household, it becomes obvious there are unintended consequences. struggles for identity and power (being universal) would just manifest in different ways. don't bother if you insist on neat and tidy resolutions because you won't find a trace of that here. the beauty of this ending is that it could go almost anywhere.
Whats the BFD about Shelley Duvall? 
2008-12-15 - Robert Altman noted in the commentary that he heard a French movie poster refer to 3 Women as "1 woman becomes 2. 2 women become 3. 3 women become 1." I agree (okay did that sound pretentious? Hey, I agree with the director) but the movie is pretty slow and the "1 woman becomes 2" part takes about 1.5 hours to get to. Slow moving. Milly and Pinky end up becoming roommates. I liked how hard Milly tries to be social and to fit in with the crowd but she just doesnt. Milly takes forever in the bathroom and likes to cook. Pinky tends to get bossed around by Milly - running after her like a puppy at times. Then Pinky gets head trauma and takes over Milly's personality. There's also random shots of this pregnant woman sand painting the pool. She's the 3rd woman. I thought Sissy Spacek was the stand out actress in this film, but in the commentary, Robert Altman couldnt stop talking about Shelley Duvall. This is one of those movies where you might be like, I dont really know what that was all about but I liked it. I wasnt one of those people.
Robert Altman's Sleeper Masterpiece
2008-09-23 - I remember first seeing this film on the A&E channel in the late 1980's. It grabbed my attention from the beginning and I ended up watching the entire thing.
Even though much of the film is deliberately meant to be ambiguous, I found it to be fascinating. I always interpreted it as a film about insecurity and the desire for the characters to be different people than who they really are. The Shelly Duvall character (Millie) is a decent person but she's not the social butterfly that she desperately wants to be. Despite Millies' delusions about herself, the Sissy Spacek character wants to be just like Millie because she seems to have no personality of her own. The Edgar character seems to have wanted to have been a tough guy/cowboy, but in reality is a burned-out, pathetic drunk. I'm still somewhat confused as to how the Janice Rule character fits into the whole scheme.
This is one of the few films where you feel like you're watching real people and not just actors portraying people and despite the bizarre ending (which I still don't fully understand). This is an excellent film.
Schizophrenic Altman finds middle ground
2008-09-04 - Robert Altman's 1977 film 3 Women, which he wrote and directed from a dream he had, is not a bad film, but not a great film either. It is one of those films, ala Robert Browning, whose reach exceeds its grasp, but not in the good way. It is intended to work on a dream level, yet it is too realistic in its detail for much of the film to be seen as all dream, and not quite bizarre enough to be real dream, especially in its far too forced, and ultimately failed, ending.
Some critics have likened the film to Ingmar Bergman's Persona, but this is a stretch. Even though that film is a bit overrated in the Bergman canon, 3 Women is nowhere in that league as a work of art: not as film, social commentary, nor work of symbolism. It has some elements in common with Roman Polanski's Repulsion, about another female misfit on the verge of insanity, as well as to the later, and far inferior, David Lynch mystery film Mulholland Drive, which was also about two women in a dreamy scenario.
The film follows the life of two lonely women who can only be called 'losers'. Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) is an ugly worker at a California old folks' health spa. She is unpopular, shunned by her co-workers- who ignore her blather despite her not realizing it, yet lives in a world of her own making, where all people like her, she is among the popular set, and life is made better by magazine ads and cooking recipes that involve all pre-processed foods and no real cooking ability. She is so clueless that every time she drives her mustard colored heap of a car her yellow skirt always gets caught in the door, and hangs outside. She also wears hideous yellow bathrobes with hoods to her apartment complex's pool, yet thinks all the men desire her.
She becomes co-workers and roommates ($55 a month- those were the days!) with an even odder girl who comes to work at the spa, one day, and seems to lack a past, even though she claims to be from Texas, like Millie. Her name is also Mildred, although she goes by the nickname Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek). Pinky is a redhead who seems almost autistic (as she would be labeled these days), and is even less capable of existing in the world....The third woman of the film is an older woman, Willie Hart (Janice Rule), who is pregnant, cold, silent, and paints bizarre man-hating pictures of pregnant gargoyle-like creatures on tiles and in pools, that seem to betray her bitterness, especially toward her no account husband, Edgar (Robert Fortier), a buffoonish would be macho man, and ex-stunt double in Western films, who is as big a joke to his sex as the two girls are to theirs, due to his penchant for guns, motorcycles, and beer. The two of them own the apartment complex, The Purple Sage- a sort of pre-Melrose Place Melrose Place for losers, the two girls share an apartment in, and also own a crappy bar, Dodge City, out in the desert, where macho loses race dirt bikes...Then, Altman tanks the film with wan surrealism that fails...It is best described as that misfit beast- 'the noble failure.' Robert Altman has always been a hit and miss director....and, unlike Michelangelo Antonioni's best films, which often seem to end not at their chronological ends, this film's ending is not the work of a carefully placed artist's inventiveness, just stylized randomness rationalized after the fact.
