SOURCE: "Why the Birthday Party Didn't Happen," in London Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 5, March 10, 1994, p. 19.

In the following review, Wood shows how the stories Altman presents in Short Cuts differ from the Raymond Carver stories on which the film is based.

Robert Altman's Short Cuts is a long, loose-looking movie, but the looseness is an effect, carefully worked for. Plenty of themes recur throughout—insecurity, chance, rage, damage, the long, bruising war between men and women—and although there are fourteen or fifteen stories here (based on, extrapolated from ten stories by Raymond Carver—the handouts and the introduction solemnly say nine stories and a poem, but the so-called poem is also a prose narrative), they are intricately stitched together, like a miniaturised Comédie hutmaine set in Los Angeles.

A doctor in a story of his own (about his delayed reaction to his wife's ancient infidelity...