[The close-up of the body at the end of Thieves Like Us] and the choice of the puddle are typical of the heaviness, the fundamentally mawkish fatalism with which Robert Altman has loaded this film. (p. 263)

[The book by Edward Anderson, on which the film is based,] does exactly what Altman's film does not do: it fixes its hero and heroine, Bowie and his girl Keechie, as creatures of circumstance, helpless and overpowered, grasping frantically for some truth—a paradox of the possibility of spirit in a drastically degraded moral landscape. We accept Bowie's values, given his conditioning, and accept the fate of Bowie and his girl as Zola-Dreiser specks of human grit bursting into flower for a few moments before the juggernaut of society rolls over them.

Almost all of this is missing from Altman's film. His only attempts to connect Bowie with society are in terms...