This nearly forgotten, low-key drama may just
be the most powerful cinematic work of Robert Altman’s
long career. Adapted from the Broadway play containing the same
cast and under his direction, Come Back to the Five &
Dime is a riveting and passionate look at small-town America,
celebrity idolization, and emotional repression.
In the decaying map-speck Texas town of McCarthy,
a group of young women bonded in the 1950’s over their
mutual adoration for one man: the actor James Dean. After his
tragic death, and the girls’ graduation from school, they
all head their own ways. In 1975, the “Disciples of James
Dean” reunite in their old headquarters, the local Woolworth’s
Five & Dime, and are rudely awakened when they see all the
things that have (and have not) changed in twenty years.
Five & Dime has a distinctly theatrical
feel to it, like the most introspective of Bergman’s works,
and it’s not surprising, given that Altman had worked
with the same cast on the piece on stage only a year before.
He does amazing things with a single location, and from a single
direction, just like a proscenium-bordered stage. To add depth
and to distinguish present from flashbacks, the whole rear wall
of the store is a giant mirror, and the events reflected in
it not only transport the viewer to an earlier time, but reverse
the image, the same way our memories tend to skew the past.
Besides Altman’s steady guidance, the film
is driven by the three lead actresses, Cher, as the sexy, outgoing
small-town queen Sissy, Sandy Dennis as the crazy and controlling
Mona, and Karen Black as Joanne, a mysterious former “Disciple”
no one remembers. Sandy Dennis delivers the performance of her
career and so delves into the psychosis of her character that
I thought at the beginning of the film she was overacting more
than I could understand Altman allowing. In fact, it is the
finely crafted work of a master actress, and fits nicely in
an unofficial trilogy with Altman’s previous 3 Women
and Images, all dealing with crazy women. In smaller
roles, Kathy Bates appears as loud and crass as ever, but with
layers of subtle depth, and Sudie Bond balances the James Dean
shrine out with her own neon-bordered Jesus painting and gospel
music.
Some might claim the film is slow, and goes nowhere,
but that’s the real genius of the pacing. As the film
progresses, it becomes apparent that the dramatic tension is
building under the surface, and never so quickly that it overpowers
the rest of the film. Then in the final act, the levee breaks,
when, one after another, Joanne’s identity is revealed,
the truth about Mona’s son (supposedly fathered by James
Dean while filming Giant in a nearby town) comes to
light, and Sissy reveals her deepest and most emotional secret.
Because all the elements of the film are so tightly woven together,
and so supremely crafted, this makes for a cathartic experience
unlike anything else in Altman’s four-decade career.
I was lucky to have the opportunity to see the
film on the big screen, as the final film in a three-week Altman
retrospective, and what a fitting ending it was. As an avid
fan of the director, I wonder how much I will have changed,
or in what ways I will still be disturbingly the same, twenty
years from now, as I look back on his recent death. If the chance
presents itself to see this hard-to-find film, do anything in
your power to experience it. It is a high point in a canon of
work paralleled by only a few other filmmakers in the last sixty
years.
