Hal Ashby’s status in film-critic circles as an underrated genius
has become, by now, somewhat overstated. If he was overlooked as film
historians began the process of lionizing the great auteurs of the
1970s, books like Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution have gone a long
way toward affirming him as one of the essential, unique, and tragic
filmmakers of that essential, unique, and tragic decade. Still, it’s
about time. Now, Northwest Film Forum is joining the hallelujah chorus
with its forthcoming series of the late director’s incredible streak
from 1970 to 1979—The Landlord (1970), Harold and
Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Bound for Glory (1976), Coming Home (1978),
and Being There (1979). This series includes two interesting
novice works, two acknowledged minor classics that are actually major
classics, two shatteringly great films that somehow no one seems to
talk about, and one perfect diamond that everyone adores.
It’s easy enough to see why Ashby got lost in the sea of Scorseses,
Kubricks, Coppolas, De Palmas, Friedkins, and even Altmans: Where the
’70s darlings developed ostentatious visual and structural styles, his
work has no obvious hook. If there is a visual signature, it’s the
preference of wide and long shots over close-ups—not exactly the
cinema of the jugular. The movement of the camera doesn’t call
attention to itself or the director. The films are not about
reinventing the cinema or establishing the thumbprint of the
auteur—they’re resolutely pre-postmodern. They’re also beautiful,
morally complex, emotionally involving, and straight-up entertaining.
Some of them were big hits. But Ashby, who directed his first film when
he was 40 and died before he was 60, seems to have had no impulse to
interpose himself between the stories and the audience. In a period
that wasn’t called the “me decade” for nothing, he preferred to stay
out of the way (aside from the odd Hitchcock cameo), allowing a tone,
not a style, to emerge as the grand unifying element of his body of
work.
The plot summaries can all be delivered in a line—alienated
young weirdo makes friends with a zany old lady who teaches him about
love; two crusty navy sailors escort a third to military prison and
decide to show him a good time on the way; uncompromising singer from
the Dust Bowl travels Depression-era America in search of an
uncompromised life; and so forth. The people are the interesting part:
Woody Guthrie refusing to stop singing his political songs even when it
means losing his shot at a major career in Bound for Glory,
George Roundy failing to secure a bank loan in Shampoo,
Buddusky and Mule storming away from Portsmouth cursing an emasculating
asshole marine (without noticing they’re marching in lockstep) in
The Last Detail. Every one of Ashby’s ’70s classics depicts
the conflict between meaningful individuality and familial, social,
economic, military, industrial, or governmental institutions that have
no room for individuals. Though inarticulate in some essential way, the
protagonists, even the antagonists, yearn to express themselves, and
sometimes succeed. (The exception, of course, is Chance in Being
There, who has absolutely nothing to say, but manages to
communicate nonetheless.) Often, they find they are united by their
common, though opposing, struggle against the same institutions. In
Coming Home, Jane Fonda transforms from Aqua Netted military
wife who won’t let her friend switch off a TV blaring “The
Star-Spangled Banner” to frizzy-haired free spirit having an affair
with a paralyzed veteran while her husband goes crazy in Vietnam. It
might have been a simple story. The film might’ve simply assigned
heroes and villains in its love triangle—Jon Voight’s
heroic-but-crippled crusader, Bruce Dern’s square patriot. But Ashby
knows it’s a better film if the housewife is already ill at ease and
even slightly relieved when her husband ships out (though she’d never
admit it); it’s a better film if when the husband comes home to
discover she’s been having an affair with a crippled but righteous vet,
he understands why and withdraws, even as it tears him apart.
Another great thing about Ashby in the context of the ’70s
renaissance: He wasn’t a cynic. There are sad endings (especially in
Shampoo), and ambiguous endings (The Last Detail,
Coming Home), but not hopeless ones. The system may win, but
it never truly prevails. Or maybe it does, but the struggle goes on
anyway. Ashby was—on film, if not in life—an optimist
despite being a realist. He celebrated the humanity of his underdog
characters even as he mined the drama of individualism colliding with a
cold world. His optimism was so powerful and palpable as to constitute
not just a worldview, but an aesthetic philosophy: optimism-ism. The
camera moves may be conventional. The ideas are anything but.
It may simply be a narrative conceit torn from the pages of Biskind
to say that such an artistic stance had no place in Reagan-era
Hollywood/America, but it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that Ashby’s
incredible streak stopped cold in 1979. Though he made films that were
more personal, the image that strikes me as the most revealing of
Ashby’s relationship to the world of art and commerce is from Being
There, when Chance exits the house into the dirty D.C. streets.
Dressed like a 1930s dandy—topcoat, homburg, gloves, umbrella,
and alligator bag in tow—he strides tentatively through streets
grimy with debris and walls marked with unrecognizable graffiti
(“America ain’t shit ’cause the white man’s got a god complex”), each
step an uncertain gamble for a vulnerable stranger meeting the real
world for the first time. The music is a disorientingly alien Brazilian
disco-funk arrangement of Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”
He clearly doesn’t belong in this environment. But he’s bound for
glory. 
