Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)
Cast: Cher, Karen Black, Sandy Dennis
Director: Robert Altman
Country: USA
Genre: Drama | Comedy
Official Site: Here
Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage for TIFF’s Company Man: The Best of Robert Altman. For more information on upcoming TIFF film series visit http://tiff.net and follow TIFF on Twitter at @TIFF_NET.
In a gratuitously verbose title selection unseen since Sergio Martino’s Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean finds Robert Altman at his most nostalgic for an effusive flavor of Americana that will forever be remembered with fondness, the smell of motor oil and cheap diner coffee, and doo wop bleating from the fatigued jukebox in the corner with its harmonic adaptations of current affairs. Altman builds an insular world in his cluttered five and dime store, and even though the film is based on a play by Ed Graczyk, Altman makes it his own by allowing his camera to study the secret treasures and buried artifacts of a piece of Americana that has eroded from existence by the tides of perpetuity.
Robert Altman at his most nostalgic for an effusive flavor of Americana that will forever be remembered with fondness, the smell of motor oil and cheap diner coffee …
Our only entry point into this world of nostalgia, heartache, secret pain, lifelong remorse and invisible burdens that shape our identities is the five and dime store that is cluttered from top to bottom with artifacts of Americana. These artifacts grow more useless with each passing season as the dusty shelves of the five and dime change duties from a place to display merchandise for sale to an exhibition of the useless and forgotten ruins of Americana. Its employees become permanent fixtures in its macabre gallery of living nostalgia, the crow’s feet around their eyes becoming more pronounced with each passing year and the dreams that defined their identities during young adulthood when everything seemed possible become worthless baggage that they desperately cling onto even after all value is lost.
The ensemble cast of Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean consists of some remarkable talent in the infancy of their careers, and though their performances are “stagey” and dialogue filled with runaway monologues of wistful exposition …
The ensemble cast of Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean consists of some remarkable talent in the infancy of their careers, and though their performances are “stagey” and dialogue filled with runaway monologues of wistful exposition, Sandy Dennis, Cher, Karen Black, and Kathy Bates bring the five and dime store to life with amiable vulgarity and infectious joy. The weaker member of the group is as vulnerable to the casual insults bandied about by her group of friends as she was twenty years ago, as groups settle into their comfortable dynamics as though time had never moved. They all cling to the days when they were the “Disciples of James Dean”, feeling important for a mere instant when they were able to get their pictures taken with Dean and bask in the irradiated light and false glamour of Hollywood if only for a moment.
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean is a film that captures the transitory value of nostalgia and the death of an America that only existed in films, magazines, music, and the imagination of its disciples. Altman studies the characters and innumerable treasures of the five and dime store in a way that is reminiscent of the leather and doo wop of Kenneth Anger tempered by a Rockwellian sensibility. It is a place where movie stars were larger than life, Orange Crush was medicine, and the American Dream had not yet been commoditized and sold to the highest bidders.
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean is a film that captures the transitory value of nostalgia and the death of an America that only existed in films, magazines, music, and the imagination of its disciples.
