Shelley Duvall in Three Women: An Homage to Ambiguity

Shelley Duvall died in her sleep (apparently from complications of diabetes) on July 11, at age 75. She was quirky, different, hard to peg down, and an incredible actress, producer, director, and writer. And she made it seem effortless.

Think The Shining. Kubrick made everyone do endless takes in almost all his movies, and he was especially hard on Shelley, in order to "break her." Jack Nicholson told Empire magazine later he thought Duvall was fantastic and called her work in the film, "the toughest job that any actor that I've seen had." She later said that "For the last nine months of shooting, the role required her to cry 12 hours a day, five or six days a week, and it was so difficult being hysterical for that length of time".

She could also do a performance simple as a folded napkin: see her journalist in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. Or Dixie in Roxane.

I think the director who understood her best (other than herself in Faery Tale Theatre) was Robert Altman. He cast her in seven movies: Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, Nashville, Buffalo Bill & the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson, 3 Women and Popeye.

Pinky Rose: I wonder what it's like to be twins.
Millie Lammoreaux: Huh?
Pinky Rose: Twins. Bet it'd be weird. Do you think they know which ones they are?

3 Women is my favorite Altman movie. I love the cast, the weirdness and the dreaminess coexisting with the banal reality of so much of the dialog, and so much of working-class life. Harassing and nit-picking bosses, indifferent and cliquish coworkers, and a full-time job that pays so little you still need a roommate to pay the bills and keep food on the table in a one-bedroom apartment. Whatever car you're driving, you'll be driving it until it finally gives up the ghost, and then no one knows how you'll replace it. That, my friends, is real life.

Duvall's Millie Lammoreaux wants more. She reads all the magazines on how to dress, how to decorate, how to act, how to be more attractive to men, and tries to make all of that real. She has no idea that she's trying too hard, is more desperate than she knows, and is a shallow bore. Her coworkers at the health spa (and yes, there are twins there) and the doctors she "lunches with" in an attempt to find a boyfriend ignore her; her fellow apartment dwellers make fun of her (especially when she slinks down the stairs to hang out at the pool in a long, hooded cover up…). Only she and Pinkie Rose think she's wonderful.

Pinky Rose: You're the most perfect person I've met.

Millie Lammoreaux: Gee. Thanks.

Sissy Spacek's Pinkie is an awkward, naive, Southern girl, who latches on to Millie like a limpet, if a limpet could flatter, adore, and imitate. Until the accident, when Pinkie nearly drowns, and when she finally returns, her personality has changed completely.

And then there's Willie. To me, Janice Rule's Willie is the real mystery of the movie: so heavily pregnant, so thoroughly clothed, almost entirely mute (but what she does with her eyes!), painting endless murals of alien-looking naked humanoids with massive penises and / or assaulting, screaming, murdering and dying on all the pools in the area – including her own. As for why she's still with Edgar, that drinking, swaggering, target shooting, womanizing has-been Western stunt double… Well, sadly, that isn't that weird. We've all seen Willie and Edgar in real life.

"Do you think they know which ones they are?"

I don't know. Do any of us really know who we are? Deep down? Remember when you were young, and you ran with a pack (or were kept or rejected from running with the pack) – and the pack really looked, talked, acted all alike so that the adults often couldn't tell one from the other. Could the pack individuate, or was that the point of keeping the pack pure? To drown in the collective?

NOTE: Speaking of drowning, there's a lot of water in 3 Women, and you can interpret it any way you like. Millie and Pinkie work a spa where they spend most of their time providing water exercise and baths. Everywhere has a pool. Dreams begin and end with water. Jung's collective unconscious? Life in the womb? Ursula LeGuin's "The Social Dreaming of the Frin"? You pick.

Some people have said they find the movie misogynistic. I don't see it that way. Each woman in 3 Women has their own character, and the actresses themselves were allowed to develop them. Altman let Spacek and especially Duvall improv a lot of their dialog. Duvall wrote Millie's diary and planned her recipes:

"I got this whole book of recipes that I'm keepin'. And I list 'em by how long they take to make. You know, if you only have 20 minutes, you just look under 20 minutes... and it tells ya all the kind of things that you can make in that amount of time."

I have heard versions of that conversation in real life.

And Millie's dress, always caught in the car door. It started off as a mistake, but Altman didn't reshoot the scene, and kept as a signature through the whole movie.

"Do you think they know which ones they are?"

I don't know, any more than I know what happened to Edgar, or how / why / when the three women end up the way they do. That's half the fun of watching 3 Women more than once. It's a mystery, like dreams...

And I like dreams. And ambiguity. Knowing your version of the ending, but also knowing it could be something else. Also from the "your guess is as good as mine, but I'll probably stick with mine" list:

• 2001 A Space Odyssey – We've only been arguing about what the hell it means for 56 years and counting...
• Solaris – (the 1972 version by Tarkovsky, PLEASE)
• High Plains Drifter - 1973, is he real or is he a ghost?
• Picnic at Hanging Rock - 1975, One of my top ten ever since the first time I ever saw it. Been watching Peter Weir films ever since.
• The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey - Australian, 1988 - another one of my top tens.

What's on your list?