In all his recent films, including A Wedding, Robert Altman has made the kind of satire that delivers a big, round-house right to the whole society. Only a director capable of great economy as a story-teller—Orson Welles is another—can do satire on this epic scale. Just as Welles was able in Citizen Kane to describe the entire course of a marriage in a few snippets of conversation at the breakfast table, so Altman can neatly create the personalities of a half dozen characters at a time. Both directors are masters of the vignette. When Altman's wedding party returns from the ceremony to the reception at the house, for instance, Altman just sends everyone off to the bathroom. As people cue up to use the facilities, in that little tension between a formal occasion and everyone's bodily functions, Altman can establish in a gesture or exchange of pleasantries what another director would need a whole scene to get across. (p. 18)
The more people your satire includes, however, the more trouble you are going to have with one person who must necessarily be in it: yourself. If you are sending up the whole world, you somehow have to admit your own place among the victims…. After all, what makes Citizen Kane great is that Welles played Kane himself. Altman's solution to the problem is not to act in his film, but rather to project onto one of the roles in it a parody of his own role as maker of it. In A Wedding, as in Nashville, this surrogate figure is the most obnoxious, irredeemable character in the movie, the one whom the satire ridicules most pitilessly. It is the character played in each film by Geraldine Chaplin. (pp. 18-19)
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