What I can't understand is not the revered tedium of Raymond Carver, but how Robert Altman managed to use this sterile material to create one of the great, rich tragicomic masterpieces of the last twenty years. The closing story here, about the death of Chekhov, is an attempt to extend his range, but the flat biographical style, the phoney insertions of 'meaningful' details and 'significant' events, the clumsy gropings for understated emotion, are quite intolerable.