Nashville

Nashville couldn't understand "Nashville," and no wonder. Anyone who watches "Nashville" for insights to country music probably views "The Godfather" for tips about olive oil. Altman's 1975 film uses country music and the people who perform, listen to and produce it as a metaphor about America in the '70s, when, as Warren Beatty said in "A Parallax View," released a year earlier, "everytime you turned around, one of the best people in the country was getting shot." Anyone who has seen the film and visits the Parthenon, where the final scenes are filmed, may feel a sense of unease. Listen closely and you can hear Haven Hamilton pleading to the stunned crowd, "Show them what we're made of! They can't do this to us here! This isn't Dallas; this is Nashville!"

The ending is astonishing, tidying up some plot lines and leaving others open ended. A star is born when the Albuquerque character and a gospel group minus its leader belt out a Nashville standard, "It Don't Worry Me." The Sueleen Gay character, meanwhile, suffers one final indignity; Albuquerque, on the same stage and with the same ambitions, achieves the fame that might have gone to Sueleen, a waitress/stripper/wanna-be recording artist, had Sueleen gotten the microphone first.

We never know what caused the Kenny Frazier character to crack; perhaps like Mark David Chapman (John Lennon) he was obsessed with the Holden Caulfield character in "Catcher in the Rye," although we can feel fairly certain that he did not share John David Hinckley's (President Reagan) obsession with Jodie Foster since "Taxi Driver" would not be released for another year.

Watching "Nashville" for the first time, you may feel protective of Barbara Jean's character for reasons you can't immediately explain but will learn all too well. I feel the same urge to shout at the screen, warning her character of possible danger, that I experienced in "From Here to Eternity," knowing that Pearl Harbor was imminent and would change everything.

Characters transform before our eyes. Del Reese (Ned Beatty), bored with his marriage to a Nashville superstar and as a father to hearing-impaired children, cares enough at the end to lead a wounded Haven Hamilton to safety. Hamilton (masterfully played by Henry Gibson) would stomp anyone in his path to create a hit record but is the first to care for Barbara Jean in her moment of need.

Sure, some of the songs are terrible -- some country music is terrible -- but could anything be more poignant than Barbara Jean's rendition of "My Idaho Home" or Keith Carradine singing "I'm Easy" in a nightclub where four of his conquests look on equally with lust and bewilderment. Country singers, like stock-car drivers, inspire tremendous loyalty and jealousy among their fans, which Altman depicts beautifully when Scott Glenn, a devoted fan of Barbara Jean, leaves the Opry as Connie White appears to sing a tribute to her ailing rival. Hamilton's character is never better than when between songs he asks listeners to send Barbara Jean a card and "tell her that Haven told you to write."

Altman would rate among the greatest directors -- as the American Fellini -- if this were his only effort. Despite its convoluted plot structure, "Nashville" achieves greatness and searches for truth. If the 1970s shaped your life in any respect, this is a movie experience not to be missed.

I saw Nashville when it was first shown, billed as Altman's "birthday card" to America on the occasion of the bicentennial. The greatest tribute I can pay is that, despite its frequent shifts of location, many individual scenes and characterizations, as well as the overarching story line, remained vivid in my mind over the years before I was able to purchase the film on video. When I taught Film History at my college I used Nashville as the final examination for the course. After having viewed the film, students were instructed to identify the elements of film technique previously studied(such as overlapping dialogue, jump shots, widescreen, etc) in order to forward the narrative, as they were employed by Altman. In general, they did very well; even those who disliked the film. There are too many admirable performances for me to mention; however, those that remained most vivid in my mind over the years were those of Gwen Welles, Ronee Blakley, Henry Gibson, and Lily Tomlin. One last note of appreciation regards the fact that all the characters were introduced within the first twenty minutes at the airport; their personalities brought out in the highway scene;and their being brought together again, cyclically, during the last twenty minutes at the "Parthenon". It has been several years since I used Nashville for pedagogical purposes. When I purchased the DVD recently I found that, despite my numerous viewings and classroom analysis, the impact was virtually the same as when I first saw it in 1976. For me, it did not "murder to dissect" this personal milestone.

Let's get the obvious out of the wa first. Nashville is a Robert Altman film and that's as close to a guarantee of a well directed, well acted film as one's likely to find in 70's cinema. However Nashville is also an almost three hour film and for its duration and amount of talent involved the payoff is not what one would expect.

Now what is it that we all look for in movies of Nashville's calibre? Why do we ask in exchange for our money and undivided attention to the screen? I'd say it's little moments of insight; into ourselves, human nature, the world by and large. Nashville has them. So what's the problem you say? The problem is that they're buried and suffocating under the enormous weight of the rest of the movie, a barrage of country and western songs, five or ten actors crammed in every other shot, three or four people talking one over the other, a narrative slump of miniplots that criss cross in every scene. Typical Altman quirks yes but here they trump what in other cases they help surface: substance.

The double axis Nashville revolves around is music and politics. An interesting combination subject in and off itself. Altman follows a reverse process, he wisely takes these two universal concepts and limits their scope significantly, music becomes the country scene of Nashville and politics a political convention of the Replacement Party. Altman lets the universal spring from the specific, for in the end of the day, despite man's countless efforts to prove the opposite, we have more in common than not. A naive, almost pathetic waitress's dream of becoming a country singer should resonate as powerfully in every culture. In that sense Nashville is more about human beings, their dreams, ambitions, secrets and inadequacies than it is about music or politics.

The politics part of Nashville is handled equally breezy and smart. Politics is largely an abstract concept for the average person, an unseen, unknown force that magically appears in television screens, newspapers and radios and governs our lives. Altman translates that same essence in the form of a political campaign van that appears throughout the movie, the unseen speaker making promises of change with a monotonous voice. The actual presidential candidate he represents never appears in the movie. He remains elusive and unseen.

However well crafted and intelligent in the handling of theme Nashville may be, in the end it's those little moments of insight into human nature that count. The charming, young country singer talking on the phone with his girlfriend while the older, married woman he just had sex with prepares to leave the room, unable to hear what is being said. The husband of said married woman who has his suspicions about the strange phonecalls his wife receives hits on the naive waitress that wants to be a star. The waitress whose lack of talent is only surpassed by her naive ambition that is driven to do a striptease in a room full of men with the promise of singing with country star Baby Jane. Baby Jane is a popular and beautiful country star only on the outside, on the inside she's fragile, neurotic and empty.

The problem with Nashville is that those little moments of insight are dwarfed by the entirety of the movie. Many of the singing scenes for example should have been left on the cutting room floor - not everyone is a country fan after all, "we get the gist now move on". In the end the way I see it is that if I'm gonna give you almost three hours of my life, you better have something really important to say. Nashville is only mildly important and not as entertaining as it would have you believe.

Nashville has 24 "main" characters and I didn't care about a single one! The movie is overstuffed and mostly boring, the characters aren't that interesting (except maybe 1 or 2 of them) and it's really hard to keep up what's going on. Most of the time I was like wait who are you again? The second part of the movie was much better and some character development was happening, I also loved the ending! This is my first Altman but I'm excited to watch more of his movies.

Robert Altman's sprawling masterpiece is a brilliant look at not just America in the mid-70s, but a reflection of the nation we were to become. Set during a Presidential campaign it weaves themes both large and small. The U. S. was about to celebrate its Bicentennial. Watergate had forced Nixon to resign. The revolutionary 60s had become the Me decade.

Altman and writer Joan Tewkesbury created a mosaic to explore and provoke. NASHVILLE may be set against the worlds of politics and country music, but, it really isn't about either. It's about a nation that is divided along many lines right down to the individual.

The massive cast (24 'main' characters) includes supreme turns by Lily Tomlin, Ronee Blakely, Ned Beatty, Henry Gibson, Karen Black, Keith Carradine, Gwen Welles and more.

In a decade where Altman also made MASH, MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER and THE LONG GOODBYE he stood as tall as anyone of that era.