Robert Altman's 3 Women is such a stimulating achievement in cinematic art that it makes one rethink the whole aesthetic of motion pictures…. There is something so utterly unusual about 3 Women that its like may never materialize again, even from Altman. It seems to be located at a fleeting intersection of two awarenesses—the artist's and society's. It is both a dream and a document, a set of facts and a cluster of myths. But the mixture of ingredients produces a very strange concoction, one difficult to describe in terms of the rhetoric of contemporary criticism….

In all of Altman's films, but most decisively in Brewster McCloud, Images, and now 3 Women, his feelings are filtered through a mystical-aesthetical framework that limits a reviewer's sociological speculation. Since I do not find self-consciousness in an artist, even a film artist, to be a crippling disability, Brewster McCloud, Images, and 3 Women are among my favorite Altman films. It is perhaps my latent, some would say blatant, antipathy to realist aesthetics that makes me react so warmly to what has been widely publicized as a literal "dream" film. (p. 40)

That [Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall] are virtually interchangeable, and [their] two characters virtually inseparable, gives 3 Women a passing resemblance to Ingmar Bergman's Persona. Of course, the extraordinarily vivid sensuality of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann provides a visual subtext of erotic entanglement at odds with the self-deprecating eccentricities of Duvall and Spacek. Consequently, Bergman's famous superimposition of one face on another verges on vampirish possession, whereas Altman distances himself from his characters and keeps them distinct from each other.

There are other differences as well, differences that should be stressed in view of the frequent mentions of Bergman's influence on Altman. Ever since Monika Bergman has dealt almost exclusively with articulate, attractive, accomplished protagonists with the capacity to serve as spokespersons for the director. Altman's characters, with the possible exception of the doomed McCabe, are down and away from the director's gaze, which mixes irony and compassion in about equal amounts. Perhaps the reason that Altman can allow his players so much freedom to improvise is that they are so completely confined in a formal box that all they actually improvise is the degree and dexterity of their wriggling. From an Aristotelian standpoint Shelley Duvall's Millie Lammoreaux and Sissy Spacek's Pinky Rose are such hopeless nitwits that they are not worthy of all the attention lavished on them…. Bergman's characters, regardless of class or sensibility, are afflicted with memory. The past is palpable in their personas. Altman's characters fashion their lives from moment to moment in a perpetual present with no roots in the past, and no regrets for lost innocence. Certainly Altman seems the least nostalgic of all directors, and even when he ventures into the past as in McCabe and Thieves Like Us he translates supposedly convivial and communal eras into modernist terms of social dislocation. Part of his artistic strategy can be interpreted as a revisionist attitude toward old Hollywood conventions, but part can be attributed also to a very oblique relationship to his own unconscious. In that context, where in Altman's dream of a movie does Altman himself appear? There does not seem to be a character in 3 Women that corresponds to Altman. Is he then merely the metteur-en-scene, a modern equivalent of Pirandello's cynical stage manager in Six Characters in Search of an Author?

The production notes quote, presumably with Altman's approval, Carl Gustav Jung's 1928 comment on the subject of dreams: "This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theatre where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic."… I would say that Bergman is more Freudian than Jungian whereas Altman is more Jungian than Freudian. At the moment let us say that we are talking about nothing more than a certain mystical emphasis on the collective unconscious among the Jungians, and a certain skepticism toward the claims of the group on the individual among the Freudians. (pp. 40, 42)

But if I want to convey what 3 Women really is as opposed to what it merely means, I could do worse than try to evoke Shelley Duvall's stride as she walks from one social Calvary to another. There is so much spiritual grace in that stride, and so much wisdom in Altman's decision to follow that stride to the ends of his scenario, that one is ennobled simply by witnessing the bonds of compassion between the director and his actress. Nothing else in 3 Women is quite so overwhelming as the cumulative gallantry under stress of Shelley Duvall's Millie. It makes everything Fellini ever did with Giulietta Masina seem patronizing by comparison. (p. 42)