Nashville (1975)
Directed by: Robert Altman
Rating: ★★★★★ (Masterpiece)
screenplay by Joan Tewkesbury
Plot rundown: Over the course of a few hectic days in Nashville, Tennessee, numerous interrelated people prepare for a political music rally as secrets and lies are surfaced and revealed.
Nashville is something else. It's a panoramic view of the Nashville music business in 1975. The story is told over 5 days, as 24--yes, 24--characters go about their business in the country-music Mecca in preparation for a political rally on the fifth day. There's a waitress who wants to desperately sing at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville; the only problem is that she's a terrible singer. There's a slimy country-singer who wants to get into the political game, and sees the rally as a way of announcing his own presidential campaign. There's a folk trio--two guys and a girl--where everybody's cheating on everybody else with each other. There's an old uncle who's coming in from Los Angeles to attend to his wife on his deathbed; he tries to get his niece to be with him when his wife dies, but the niece just wants to hang out with a bunch of country-rock-stars, smoke dope, and be an attentive groupie. There's a psychofreak on a tricycle who gives rides to unsuspecting hitchhikers. There's a mousy blonde woman who just wants to sing to a big crowd of people, but can't seem to find the audience because she's on-the-run from her trucker husband. At the end, these electric, zig-zagging personalities all converge at the Parthenon in Nashville, where the presidential rally/concert for the independent presidential candidate Hal Philip Walker (a perfect shoe-in for Bernie Sanders) takes place. The trailer best explains the seeming lunacy of having 24 main characters in one film:
I saw this magical film for the first time about two years ago, receiving the sleek Criterion Blu-Ray as a Christmas present. Let me tell ya: it had such a profound effect on me, as far as storytelling and emotional investment goes. It manages to do what few films bother to attempt nowadays: it gives you a robust view of a weird and striking society--America in the 1970s--by introducing no less than twenty-four major characters and letting them loose upon one another. It goes that extra mile by getting you so emotionally invested in EACH of these off-beat characters, that it breaks your heart when the film ends. I felt like I knew a whole lot more about how people think, how people interact with one another, the tragedies and the hardships they have to suffer. Nashville gave me that communal sense of belonging. I loved eavesdropping in on Lily Tomlin's character Linnea, a well-meaning housewife who is devoted to her hearing-impaired kids and who is neglected by her lawyer-husband (Ned Beatty). It was utterly heart-wrenching seeing Ronee Blakley's Barbara Jean, a successful and happy country music-star on the outside, suffer nervous breakdowns caused by her pot-bellied, domineering husband (Allen Garfield). It was hilarious seeing the pratfalls of Barbara Harris' Winifred, a mousy blonde wife who desperately seeks to break into the Nashville music business, and who shocks everyone in the end, which I won't dare say much about. The ending of this movie is a jolt out of a fantasy unlike any other I felt happen in a movie; I felt like Altman robbed me of a core emotional part of my being, but then the final song comes on, and it's suddenly makes all the more sense.
The MUSIC in Nashville is out of this world. It is entirely country music, but if you hate country, not to worry. These songs are performed with the utmost of energy, manic or otherwise, and are certifiable earworms worthy of any pop-radio-station. Seriously, if you're not humming "It don't worry me, it don't worry me, you may say 'I ain't free', but it don't worry me..." by the end of the movie, you'd better check your pulse. Altman's shifting soundtrack is part satire, part send-up, part tribute. We register country music has a wide variety of sounds—jingoistic patriotism (“200 Years), chugging “Tennessee-Three”-style romping (“Tapedeck in His Tractor”), Dylanesque acoustic folk (“I’m Easy”)—but, at the end of the day, it returns to the core of music. The feeling of joy and togetherness it brings to people. The simplicity of the message of Keith Carradine’s song, now sung with unbelievable gospel verve by Barbara Haris: “Hey, we may have a lot of shit going for us, but that’s not gonna keep me from trying my hardest to be happy. We have our lot in it together. Let’s keep a-goin’ for all our sakes!” The actors all write and perform their own songs: a feat on its own. In fact, there's actually only one real country-star in the cast: Ronee Blakley, who plays the tortured country muse Barbara Jean. She feels the adoration of all her adoring fans, but inside she's living a silent hell at the hands of her husband who won't let her rest. We never truly get a sense of the problems that plague Barbara Jean, but the harrowing scene in the hospital is enough of an indication that things aren't so rosy when the curtain goes down and the microphones are turned off. Listen closely to her singing "Dues" here and admire the conviction with which she belts out that mean song:
These characters are people we know, people we encounter on a daily basis on a street, and who've got fascinating stories to tell, but we are too self-absorbed to even care about them. Altman dares to make you care. I know I mentioned Tomlin, Blakley, and Harris, but there are so many other dynamite performances in here. The chauffeur, the folk trio on the verge of a breakup, the ridiculed black singer ("the whitest nigger in town! A regular Oreo!" says the chef played by Robert Doqui; Nashville does a tremendous job of making you feel the palpable racial tension in the town, and how little we've come in terms of eradicating racism), the ridiculous white midget country-singer, his neurotic mistress, and Opal. Oh Opal. The busy-body BBC reporter who sticks her nose in the wrong places, whose church on Sundays is a graveyard of buses for her scoop on Nashville in her BBC documentary. The great irony of her missing the big event at the film's end should not be lost on anybody.
There's a particular moment at the end of Nashville where Keith Carradine (the self-absorbed womanizer Tom) sings "I'm Easy" and the camera cuts to Geraldine Chaplin (Opal) looking to Keith. She looks elated, she feels powerfully confident as she realizes that the song may be for her. That one look solidifies the movie for me; it's such a great cut, because in five silent seconds, we know the score. And we feel so much sadness for Opal when she realizes that no, the song's not for her. This is filmmaking at its finest; that shot of Opal's sad face doesn't need to be in there. But because it is, Altman clues us in that this film functions on a much subtler level than we expect of films. We expect American films to dazzle us with taut plots and a tight narrative. Nashville isn't like that. It's panoramic. It seems to break all the rules and puts them all back together. We don't watch Nashville for the stories; moreso for the people, to see true-blue Americans talking with one another, honestly or dishonestly. It is slowly becoming my favorite film the more I watch it; the pain Altman portrays is gritty and realistic, but the optimism he presents is unbridled.
It's a long film, for sure, but it is truly a masterpiece to be beheld. It's for movie lovers and for anybody who's interested in ensemble dramas. Every couple months or so, I watch it again and feel like I'm meeting old friends who haven't changed...but I have. It's almost an entire world condensed into 160 lightning-quick minutes of virtuouso 70s filmmaking unparalleled by any other. And it's, at its core, America. It's America, man. It's all of its ugly contradictions and triumphant moments, its ups and downs, its obsessive celebrity crushes and its missed connections, its affairs, its children, its brothers, its lovers: it's all there, and it's beautiful.
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