BREWSTER MCCLOUD or How I Learned to Stop Daydreaming and Face Reality

SPOILERS BELOW

I spend a lot of time going on walks, even more so in the past year due to the pandemic. There’re several things that always catch my attention every time I’m out: the sky, birds, and the passerby on my corner of south Austin. It’s in those moments that I’m reminded of Robert Altman’s largely forgotten masterpiece Brewster McCloud, with its offbeat observations of modernity, Americana, and a boy who dreams about flying away. 

Pivoting off the success of M*A*S*H, Altman was offered his pick of scripts and ended up settling on an oddball tale penned by Doran William Cannon about the titular Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort). Brewster is a young man living in the rafters of the Houston Astrodome, working constantly on a pair of mechanical wings he seeks to use to take flight within the stadium. He’s aided by his mysterious “fairy godmother” (Sally Kellerman), who helps him with making his dreams come true. At the same time, there’s a spree of bird-poop related murders happening around town and super-cop Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy) is called in to find the culprit, suggesting at a possible link between the killings and Brewster.

Important to note in the final sentence of that plot synopsis is the word “suggest”. On paper, this script likely would have made Brewster and the death by bird poop definitive. However, Altman, in his stoner ways, re-writes the concept to lend the entire narrative a sense of a dubious accuracy from the start. There’s a sort of dream logic to the entire affair, a free-flowing narrative that has a scattershot focus. We bounce around between so many characters that it often feels like Brewster himself is an afterthought in his own movie. 

Yet at the same time, this is where Altman begins almost dissecting the archetypes of the prototypical fairy tale, especially one of a tragic nature. Though Kellerman’s fairy godmother character is more literal, the rest of the characters do seem to fill these roles in rather interesting ways: Brewster is the warrior, the cops and mayor the dastardly villains/horde, and Shelley Duvall’s Suzanne as the princess/seductress. Altman’s cynicism toward the “establishment” and normalcy gives each of these characters a rougher edge. Brewster may be a knight in armor (in this case a suit of mechanical wings), but is also a possible serial killer. Conversely, the cops on his trail range from buffoons to egomaniacs to public wife beaters. Duvall (in her film debut no less!) operates as a prototypical manic-pixie dream girl before the term came into vogue, but also as a hell of a getaway driver, putting both Ryan O’ Neal and Gosling to shame.

The more obvious literary comparison here is the Greek tragedy of Icarus, and in that Brewster McCloud becomes less a sight gag parade, and something more of an indictment of dreaming, or, in Altman’s case, the American dream. Coming out in the midst of the Vietnam War, there’s a mischievous skewing of most of the major establishments of America on display here: racist socialites, drug planting cops, and (maybe) major league sports. The recurring motif of bird shit everywhere has an almost schoolboy mischievousness to it, as if this is Altman’s childhood angst translated to screen. One can take this to parallel the bottoming out of the 1960s hippie dream and all the optimism it once had for the future. Perhaps more than something like Zabriskie Point, this movie above all else acts as a herald for the end of an era and a lamentation for what was not achieved.  The higher you soar, the farther you inevitably will fall.

Such a fatalistic mindset would explain the movie’s strange fixation on sex as a sort of omen hanging over Brewster. On the advice of his fairy godmother, Brewster rebuffs the horny advances of his unrequited crush (Jennifer Salt) and it’s ultimately losing his virginity to Suzanne that dooms him.  More than some weird incel screed (which I’m sure they could parse from this movie if they really wanted to), it seems to suggest a loss of innocence, and by extension of Altman’s ambivalence toward progress, the destruction of dreaming.

Confining Brewster’s climactic flight within the Astrodome as cops chase him around, Altman frames the final achievement of this dream as nothing more than futility. Brewster challenges all in that moment: the girl who broke his heart, the establishment ready to take him down, and the laws of physics. On these levels, the conflict becomes something mythic: a man vs. love, power, and even nature itself. Unlike Icarus before him, Brewster isn’t done in by his own ego, but rather by reality. He can’t ultimately fly away because his fantasy is simply incompatible with the brutal reality outside his Astrodome bubble, as the cops pour into his byzantine baseball birdcage. An idealist can’t win because that goes against the nature of life itself. 

Altman’s films often have a sense of free-flowing, improvisatory camera movement, but in Brewster McCloud, it adds a sense of detachment from the odd imagery. Like a 60s Godard flick, it consciously seems to be calling attention to its surreal, heightened reality it operates in, but conveying it with a sense of understated naturalism. This isn’t One Perfect Shot™ cinema. Instead, it’s about the movement of characters and objects in the frame, often for the purpose of some pretty terrific sight gags and references. Everything from Brewster consciously dressed like Waldo to the Little League team named “The WASPs” make me laugh out loud each time.

Along with Last Night at the Alamo and Paris, Texas, Brewster McCloud towers as a masterpiece of Houston cinema. I can’t think of another movie that makes use of the city as a sprawling character in itself, from the tangled ball of yarn that is its road system to the vapidity of oil-money suburbia. Covering its bitter resignation with a coating of absurdist humor, I’d venture to call this an arthouse comedy. Just because life is a downward spiral doesn’t mean you can’t have a few laughs on the plummet down.