Altman's Brewster McCloud is somewhere between allegory and surreal, a whole trash can full of symbols,which are offered as untrue, with an urbane cynicism like Mephisto in Goethe's Faust. There's something inauthentic about everything, the color of falseness in our world, in our eyes, in our dreams. Altman is always exploring the inauthentic. There are so many levels to Brewster McCloud. I think we should begin that it's about innocence. Our hero is a pure innocent boy who has a guardian angel, and she guides him and protects him. The boy has a very pure aspiration. "through difficulty to the stars:" "Per aspera ad astra," as the Latin motto often reads. Like any good guardian angel, Brewster's keeps him from going astray. Central imagery is the fact that "Astrodome" means "dome of the stars," Of course, the name of the Astrodome refers to the Houston Space Center, but in the language of dream, it is very recognizably the Celestial Sphere(s), Heaven. This is all very good stuff. We also might find room for the Aeschylus symbol of a young man who put on wings his father made him and aspired to fly. Having flown too high, Aeschylus's wings melted and he crashed to Earth. Fortunately, within the gates of Surrealism, one can use symbols for unrelated purposes and never have to resolve the conflict, although it's likely that these Christian and Greek symbols aren't at all in conflict.Standing in Brewster's way are the police/guards, each of whom manifests, I suspect, one of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Gremlin (a car offered here for the value of its name), the vanity of the contact lenses, and the sloth of the morbidly obese guard waddling around, all making it clear that the forces against McCloud are evil, not in a grand way, but with a tongue in cheek, with an urbane wit, and an urbane doubt. They aren't terror but banality, a failure to hit the mark.The way these elements play out is tinny and false as we expect everyday life to be. There is no grand evil nor does innocence seem very heroic. Are we supposed to believe this is true, somehow expressing something? Is it only a mockery? Well, probably both, like the mock "suicide" scene staged with and for the dentist everyone knows as "Painless" in Altman's "M.A.S.H." I've not touched on the birds, but they make sense in the tradition of Greek epic and tragedy, that the fates speak through birds; somehow birds are closer to fate than we. And what connection does an angel have to do with birds? the pure freedom of the skies, I suppose, and angel's wings always have feathers, whereas the denizens of the dark realms usually have leathery wings.Our Lecturer is some kind of seer, a Tiresias, who expresses his sensitivity to the fates by his affinity to the birds. He is so fascinated with all things avian, he seems to be morphing into one of them.

If ever there was a love it or hate it film, this is it."Brewster McCloud" is a glorious mess, an imperfect film in that fascinatingly imperfect way that only Robert Altman could pull off. I admit that much of my affection for this film lies in the fact that I studied it in a Robert Altman seminar; each of us picked one movie to watch, analyze and report back on to the class, and this was mine. I was completely befuddled by it the first time I watched it, but then after I'd seen it three or four times, trying to make sense of it in order to talk to the class about it, I sort of fell in love with it.Brewster, played perfectly by Bud Cort, lives in the Houston Astrodome and harbors the intense desire to fly. His efforts in that direction are complicated by any number of odd-ball characters, including a rich tycoon for whom he works as a chauffeur (an unrecognizable Stacy Keach delivers a howler of a performance as the tycoon, and has far too little screen time), a private investigator (Michael Murphy) with a penchant for colorful turtlenecks who's investigating a series of murders around the city, and a couple of bizarre female love interests, played respectively by Jennifer Salt and a divinely whacked out Shelley Duvall. Meanwhile, a sort of guardian angel (Sally Kellerman) with scars on her back where wings used to be follows Brewster around and may just be responsible for the murders taking place around the city (every corpse the cops find is splattered with bird crap). And last but not least, in perhaps the most bizarre role (and that's saying something in this movie), Rene Auberjonois plays some kind of professor delivering a lecture on man's desire to fly, who serves as a kind of narrator for the film and gradually turns into a bird himself.Much of the film doesn't really make any sense in a conventional way, even after multiple viewings. The film is a lot like Altman's break out hit, "MASH," from the same year, with the overlapping dialogue, chaotic action and super-sarcastic sense of humour, but it doesn't have a universal topic like war around which to anchor itself, and many viewers might feel like they're watching an extended inside joke not meant for them. What is one to make, for example, of the use of Margaret Mitchell as a cranky old lady whose face we never see but whose voice is ingrained in our collective subconscious, and who is wearing an awfully familiar pair of ruby slippers when her body is found, victim to the mysterious avian serial killer? The allusion to "The Wizard of Oz" of course is obvious, but what purpose does it serve? The same can be said of Murphy's hilarious, dead-pan parody of Steve McQueen's character Bullitt, and the movie even includes a ridiculous and long high-speed car chase that pays homage to the one in that 1968 hit. It's all very funny, and maybe that's point enough, but I can't pretend to know what Altman was trying to say.But the ending, after all the glibness that has preceded it, comes to a poignant and quite emotionally affecting conclusion. Bud Cort is the perfect actor to make us root for Brewster, and once we see this strange and even rather creepy kid get himself airborne with a set of makeshift wings, our hearts soar and we want to see him achieve the impossible. Watching him frantically flapping his wings as he sails around the Astrodome, only to plummet to his death, offers a sad reminder that some dreams, no matter what optimists may say, are never attainable.Believe it or not, "Brewster McCloud" was the 1970 release that Altman thought would be the biggest hit, and he was very disappointed when "MASH" scored five Academy Award nominations and "Brewster" was ignored. One can't even conceive how Altman ever thought the stuffy Academy would go for something as esoteric as this.Grade: A

Admirably odd, though mean-spirited comedy-drama about a strange young man who hopes to fly like a bird through the Houston Astrodome. Robert Altman-directed quasi-comedy with eccentric characters is so overloaded with weirdos that it starts to creak early on from the weight. Some of the cinematography is evocative, Shelley Duvall is a stitch in her debut as a tour guide, and Sally Kellerman looks every inch the glamourpuss as Bud Cort's vision of a "mother bird" (imagine Altman and producer Lou Adler explaining that role to her!). In the lead, Bud Cort is--once again, after "Harold & Maude"--a true original; not off-putting like, say, Michael J. Pollard, Cort manages to be geeky, wacky and inoffensive, a tough act to pull off. Unfortunately, this is one of Altman's misfires. He can put together a cast and a showpiece like no one else, but let him get fired up with some misguided inspiration and he spirals downward. ** from ****

Folks must have been very stoned when they made this .... It is such a "playful" film with so many great characters (and actors) riding on a very wild and surreal mixed up mythology. The film should be re-released (maybe since Altman got an Oscar they will).I don't know how he got away with making this... but thank God he did! In many ways Robert Altman except for his hands off approach to his actors has created many films that are at the equal to Fredrico Fellini in satire and whimsically profound sequences that baffle the audience -= but ain't it nice to home from a movie and remember it because you just can't get the ideas and images out of your head. This is a very funny film. It has the Star Spangle Banner, Ruby Slippers, Bird Do-Do, Mustard pumps, un-principled law enforcers, and wings that try very hard to fly away.