Clean breaks

Kansas City Robert Altman (15)

Most films are so linear in their construction that it takes a little time to get used to the ones that aren't. Robert Altman's Kansas City isn't one of his large-scale ensemble pieces - it's not a Nashville or a Short Cuts. It's more like a film from his great Seventies period, the period of exploration after the overrated (both then and now) M*A*S*H. It has the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces - between magpie detail and underlying unity - that has eluded Altman so often. Kansas City harks back to Thieves Like Us (1974) in its 1930s setting, and in having at its centre a woman in love with a gangster. But while Shelley Duvall's Keechie in the earlier film was an innocent who showed, in the last sequence, disconcerting powers of survival, Blondie in the new film, as played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, is rather the other way about: a woman with an apparently flinty will, and a self-presentation modelled on her heroine Jean Harlow - ill-looking, defiant, cheap - whose core is her soft, helpless love for Johnny (Dermot Mulroney).

The film has an outstanding jazz soundtrack, and Altman sees the whole film as a kind of jazz, with each character contributing a solo. But it wouldn't be a rewarding workout if there were no fat juicy chords for the soloists to bounce off. The director himself was raised in Kansas City in the period of the film, and admits to a degree of nostalgia, but he has taken care to give nostalgia a bitter taste.

His screenplay (co-written with Frank Barhydt) emphasises dark elements that a pre-teen Altman is unlikely to have noticed: stark political corruption, the miseries and tensions of segregation. At one point, a black woman returning to her seat in a cinema after a visit to the powder room passes two white women behaving oddly. This isn't even a speaking part, but as a fleeting study in the body language of oppression it beats what Hollywood has attempted in whole well-meaning films. She draws her arms in, flinching defensively with the knowledge that her vulnerability is not lessened but actually increased when white people step out of role.

The whole story is one of crossing boundaries: Johnny blacks up to rob a rich black man who is visiting the city with a fat money-belt to gamble away, and when he is rapidly caught (since this is not a heist of the highest intellectual ambition) his life is forfeit to the club owner - Seldom Seen, played by Harry Belafonte - who is the rightful recipient of the money, as it flows across his gaming tables. Blondie, in her desperation to save her man, kidnaps the wife of a local politician, relying on his extorted influence to arrange a rescue.

As a thriller plot, this isn't exactly perfect. It requires Blondie to come up with an elaborate scheme at a moment's notice, and one that depends on Seldom Seen doing what he in fact does - keeping Johnny alive and unharmed, almost as a form of torture, while Belafonte considers how to punish him, exactly, and delivers monologues about black and white in America. It's nice to see Belafonte cast as a heavy - and he bears himself almost like Brando in The Godfather. But his speeches rather overstay their welcome, particularly as there's no one in the film to challenge him (Johnny says very little). Jazz is to some extent a competitive art form, as a "cutting contest" in the film demonstrates.

Nevertheless, Blondie's plot produces the duet between her and her captive, Mrs Stilton, which are the highlights of the film. The two women come from different worlds, and remain separated even when they are hiding together in a car, or dozing on a bench in the railway station. Blondie is preoccupied with Johnny's danger and with defending Jean Harlow against accusations of cheapness, while Mrs Stilton is preoccupied with anything and everything, thanks to her dependence on the laudanum bottle, whose dropper she sucks with genteel need. In Miranda Richardson's superbly disoriented performance, she may ramble on about ghosts and rabbits, or drop into the language of dime magazines ("This is our final ride"), or cut across a tense confrontation with the airy comment that the word nigger is not used in her household.

Altman must know how unlike jazz the negative bonding of this odd couple is, but Richardson's off-key reactions are what keep the film on track. The character's emotions remain ambiguous: when she slyly adds a drop of laudanum to the drinking water of Blondie's pet bird, is it because she identifies with the captive, or is this sort of furtive revenge the way she retaliates inside her empty marriage?

Kansas City has a weary moral centre, in Addie Parker, mother of Charlie who will grow up to be a Bird with a laudanum problem of his own. Addie responds with dignity and without fear to everything life throws at her. But Altman is less interested in people who make good out of bad than in those who make stubborn beauty out of ugliness - Blondie, whose love for a worthless man is absolute and unshareable, and the musicians who are entirely enclosed in a world of exploitation and cruelty except when they play. And they play all the timen