Continuing with the theme of people who died in 2024, next up is a movie TCM ran at the end of December when they were doing their annual night of movies dedicated to people who left us in 2024. This time, the star in question is actress Shelley Duvall, and the movie TCM selected to honor her was 3 Women.
As you can guess, there are in fact three women who are the stars of the piece, although two of them get bigger roles. The movie opens with shots of people walking around a swimming pool, with the camera eventually pulling out to reveal that this is a pool at a geriatric spa which is probably attached to a nursing home, although that winds up not being important to the plot. Instead, we soon meet Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek). She's just come west from Texas out to the Palm Springs area to start a new life and is looking for a job at this rehab center even though she doesn't seem to have any of the credentials that you would need in 2025. (I'm not quite aware of what credentials one would have needed back in 1977.) In any case, Pinky gets the job, and will the following day be shown the ropes by to-be co-worker Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall).
Pinky seems to like Millie, which is a good thing for Millie since the rest of the staff aren't the biggest fans of her. That's partly her own fault because she goes off to the nearby hospital cafeteria for lunch with the real doctors instead of the on-site cafeteria. In any case, when Millie makes a comment about her roommate having moved out to get married, Pink immediately talks Millie into taking her on as a roommate in the motel-like apartment where she lives.
At this point, we meet the third woman, Willie Hart (Janice Rule), who with her husband Edgar (Robert Fortier) owns both the apartment complex and a bar in the desert that used to be a tourist trap tied in with the old west and its use as location filming for B westerns or somesuch: Edgar's past job was as a stunt double in movie westerns. Willie is also pregnant, which is going to matter at the end of the movie.
Pinky starts getting closer to Millie, although some of Pinky's habits begin to get on Millie's nerves. Millie doesn't realize that Pinky is actually rather manipulative, as well as trying to learn intimate details of Millie's life. Matters come to a head when Millie comes up to the apartment one night with Edgar, who is drunk, and with whom she plans to have an affair. Pinky jumps into the apartment complex's swimming pool, nearly drowning and winding up in a coma, at which point the movie begins to get really weird.
And for me, that's the big problem I had with 3 Women. It's weird, which in and of itself isn't a bad thing, as there are lots of off-kilter movies that work because the audience doesn't know where it's going. But 3 Women feels like a dream: or, more accurately, it feels like the dream that director Robert Altman claims inspired it. Either way, the characters start changing personalities in ways that don't work for traditionally plotted movies and make things extremely difficult in figuring out who's doing what to whom and why. It also runs a shade over two hours, which frankly is too long for a movie like this.
Critics, on the other hand, loved 3 Women. So you may want to give it a try and find that your opinion of it is closer to the critics' view than my opinion is.
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