Surreal, Ambiguous and at times disturbing. This offering from Robert Altman is claimed to have been based on the director's dreams. It captures the lives of three women whose personalities take a bizarre turn after an accident.This movie needs multiple viewings to arrive at one's own interpretation. Recommended for Viewers who like movies that leaves an audience with more questions than answers.

Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) works at a spa for elderly folks. Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek) is a new employee that Millie is assigned to show the ropes. Pinky is childlike and naive and almost instantly becomes completely enamored with MIllie. She moves in with her and slowly starts to become her. Millie is extremely talkative and organizes her life around what she reads in women's magazines. She talks to everyone constantly, but most of them are never listening, and those that do openly ridicule her. Altman is clearly very inspired by "Persona", so much so that, like that film, the action here is halted by a violent action and the entire film is restructured from that point on. The third titular woman is Willie Hart (Janice Rule), the pregnant wife of the man who owns the building they live in. She is an artist who paints murals in various places including the pool at the apartment complex. She almost never speaks, but is obviously aware that her husband is a drunken philanderer. There's another climactic scene that splits the film and rearranges the three into a unit that seems to complete these three fragmented personalities. Altman said this film came to him in a dream and it certainly feels like a dream. It has an internal logic that works on its own terms, and I personally think it's one of his better films. Duvall and Spacek have never been better.

The first lackluster hour is filled with vapid dialogue mainly between two extremely unintelligent characters. This first hour is an opportune moment for washing dishes, washing clothes, or any other kind of menial chore. Trust me, the film hardly requires your cognitive faculties.Finally, tension finally builds around 65:00, but the film hardly takes off, wastes time on moments that can be summarized succinctly in 1 minute, etc. There's nothing really shocking, and any opportunity for additional excitement is crushed by Altman's apparent genius.If this is Altman's best film, then consider not seeing any. Do something more valuable with your time.

Robert Altman's 3 WOMEN (1977) with Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek & Janice Rule, has remained my all-time favourite picture since I accidentally caught in on the Z-channel at 3 in the morning back when I was like 13... It remains Altman's least trademark work, filled with lots of non-sequitors, a very dream-like logic and structure, hints of surrealism, absurdism & devastating tragedy, one of the most original motion picture musical scores of all time (by Gerald Busby) and unquestionably Shelley Duvall's strongest, most moving and engaging performance of her entire career, it is also her single starring role... and the films ending segment, which ends in the strictly impressionistic, ambivalent surprise of Altman quietly 'pulling the rug out from underneath you', for my money perfectly compliments the rest of the film by slyly leaving everything you have just seen (and any of it's possible vague inflections about the human experience, and how and whatever any of the film intended to represent or comment on) completely and 100% up to your own personal interpretation... just as Donald Cammell's equally brilliant PERFORMANCE (1970) also succeeded in portraying and also shares practically the exact same deus-ex-machina of it's last final frames of film as does this largely unheralded, bona- fide Altman masterpiece, which has only managed to gain an incredible amount of momentum and word-of-mouth acceptance as the grand old dame of 1970's art house cinema of which it truly is.