M*A*S*H

In the overlapping worlds of the cinematic and the televisual, the chicken and the egg are interchangeable. Sometimes the show will come first and give birth to a feature film, and other times the movie hatches first and then evolves into a long-running show. M*A*S*H is a case of the latter. The show was hugely successful, famously running for longer than the war in which it’s set. But before it took its form of weekly instalments of the shenanigans that an American military medical unit get up to amidst the horrors of warfare, it was a mere hour and a half of nothing but. 

The film begins with the arrival of Captain Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) at the medical camp and quickly progresses into a lengthy depiction of the shenanigans that he and his friends get up to in their attempts to keep their sanity amidst the horror of war. Their misadventures include secretly broadcasting a fellow officer having sex with an uptight major over the camp radio, staging a living wake and then preventing a comrade’s suicide, some serious gambling on a game of football, and drinking the occasional dry martini without olives. 

I have never seen an episode of the series. I have heard that if you love the series, you hate the film (though this is not lore). To write a comparison between the two would be a) uninformed and b) something that’s probably already been done. And so this is simply another review of a movie that I just finished watching. I can say that I understand the appeal of the film and why it’s considered a successful and important movie in cinema. But personally I do not think the M*A*SH movie has aged well. 

Director Robert Altman created a clever black comedy in the guise of a war movie without any war being depicted. Set against the swamp greens, canvas, and tank tops, this movie is like a stew with too many ingredients: over-cluttered with characters (many of which oppose one another) and over-seasoned with dialogue. In a comically ironic way, the chaos of this movie is a visual representation of, not just warfare, but the mood of the antiwar movement. It’s hard to get a sense of what’s going on. 

Actually this is an understatement as there is no real plotline to speak of and the characters continually speak over one another making the dialogue impossible to hear, let alone draw any exposition from. It’s a filmic reflection of the Chaos Theory: characters are left to their own devices and shit happens. 

But of course, this is the way it’s intended. Much of M*A*S*H was shot randomly and captured a lot of the cast’s improvisations with Altman making it up as he went along and famously tricking the studio into believing he was making a patriotic war movie. With its antiestablishment streak and overt depictions of a militant military being mocked and degraded (any figures who exert authority receive cruel punishment by way of ridicule), M*A*S*H is definitely no war movie. 

I can see and appreciate its cleverness (and it is clever), but its deliberate lack of structure and discipline, whilst working as a strong reflection of societal attitudes at the time, make it a very trying movie experience. Any witty dialogue is drowned out by someone else’s speech, and the thick stew of characters proves difficult to form attachments to. All you can do is wade through and try and stitch some form of narrative and point together from the fragments of genre that have not been blown away. 

Starring: Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt, Sally Kellerman, Robert Duvall, Roger Bowen, Rene Auberjonois, and David Arkin 

Year: 1970 

Rating: M