Satire from a Master-List of Taboo Subjects

Rating: 8/10 (21 August 2014)

OK, I think more historical context is needed before watching this film than any other classic I know of. It is as if Altman was acting as a version of Beale from 1976's superior satire "Network" - mad as hell about society of the time (1970) and even the conventions of movies themselves, and not going to take it anymore. Like almost all reviewers here, I agree that the film is only accidentally funny. But then again, so was "Network." Humor implies a bit of levity, and this is instead a purely angry film - it is like an attack, more so than almost any other American film I have seen except for maybe "Happiness" or "Born on the Fourth of July."
First, there's the famous overlapping dialogue, then the other American sacred-cow subjects he massacres - war, authority figures, love, monogamy, religion, homosexuality, sanctity of medicine and its practitioners, communitarianism, shared goals, women's lib, sports, and politics. Finally, Altman throws out the very idea of sustained linear plotting with an established group of characters - allowing the camera to follow characters who appear, play little role in the plot line, and then mysteriously disappear. That is the defining feature of life and war, and it is something which was surprisingly absent from all films of that era.
One also gets the sense that Altman was like a newly-emancipated repressed teen after having had to abide by the strict conventions of television and the studio system on all of his previous work. If one is looking for a similar, but funnier, satire of American culture of the time, watch Norman Lear's "Cold Turkey." That film has aged much better than MASH, but MASH was by far the more influential.