Review of Nashville (1975) by Brian D — 30 Apr 2012

Maybe If It Were Half an Hour Shorter?

Robert Altman's gift was in layering the lives of characters, layering dialogue. He created [i]worlds[/i] in his films; each and every person in the movie might believably have walked off the screen and gone on with their lives, because the film had more than just a few characters despite being set in the middle of an enormous city. When he's on top of his form, it really works, pulling together a huge cast into a film they inhabit, not merely act in. However, he was universally acknowledged to be a bit hit-or-miss. And, it seems, I'm considerably less impressed by him than a lot of other people. This is yet another movie which is considered classic Altman but which I simply don't like very much. For one thing, I'm not sure we need all twenty-four characters. I think it drags the movie down. There was talk of releasing it as two movies, simply because twenty-four characters equaled a whole lot of film.

Therefore, you will understand that a plot synopsis will necessarily be sketchy. This is the story of five days in Nashville, Tennessee, and the lives of people from all levels of connection with Nashville's biggest industry--country music. We have the three major stars. Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), and Connie White (Karen Black). Haven Hamilton is accompanied by Lady Pearl (Barbara Baxley), Barbara Jean is managed by husband Barnett (Allen Garfield), and Connie White is hoping to steal Barbara Jean's spotlight. Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin) is a gospel singer married to Delbert (Ned Beatty), who is working for the Nashville campaign of mystery Presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker, whose campaign manager is John Triplette (Michael Murphy). They hire tone-deaf waitress Sueleen Gay (Gwen Welles) to perform at a dinner; she thinks sing and they mean strip. The trio of Bill (Allan Nicholls), Mary (Cristina Raines), and Tom (Keith Carradine) is being torn apart because Mary is married to Bill but in love with Tom. Who wants to sleep with Linnea. And so forth.

In all honesty, I think we could lose quite a few characters and have a better, tighter film. Because that's not all the characters; I haven't mentioned "L.A. Joan" (Shelley Duvall) and her uncle, Mr. Green (Keenan Wynn), yet. Or the soldier (Scott Glenn) who is fixated on Barbara Jean. Or the mysterious Guy Who Looks Like Stephen King (David Hayward). And so forth. To be perfectly honest, I don't know what Shelley Duvall was doing there other than being shown to look wistfully at Keith Carradine or whoever in crowd scenes. And create stress for Keenan Wynn, who was there . . . to be stressed by Shelley Duvall, I guess. A few of the characters, such as Wade (Robert Doqui), were nice and memorable but not, broadly, important and could have been shed without doing too much harm to such narrative as there is here.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Blasphemy all the way 'round. And, given the kind of people who know and obsess over this kind of film, I'm opening myself up to charges of "not getting it." But you know, I do understand, I think, exactly what Altman was trying to do here. In some ways, I even think he showed technical skill at it. It still just doesn't work for me. I believe that the candidate the movie mentions a lot but never shows could win a great following just by spouting such weird philosophy as "Doesn't Christmas always smell like oranges to you?" (No.) Though of course it's also true that a third-party candidate logically cannot win any primaries, which are between candidates within a party. And it's also true that Nashville, like Los Angeles, New York, and any other media industry town, is full of the people who really desperately want to be stars in whatever artform it is despite the fact that they are really, really bad at it. I think this story could be done in a way which appealed to me, and the simple fact is that Altman didn't do it.

But I have noticed that I am less impressed than most with the Great Movies of the 1970s. It was, I think, an extremely guy-centric decade in film. Yes, okay, this movie had an almost balanced cast, so far as that's concerned, but one of the things which bothered me most about it was something Altman probably didn't expect to be that problematic. I felt he was trying to make us part of Sueleen's humiliation, and I almost thought he was trying to make us agree that she should pay for the sin of not listening when people told her she couldn't sing. And, yes, she was setting herself up for humiliation--but why did she have to be literally stripped naked for it? Maybe if some good had come of it. Maybe if we knew the character better and could know that, eventually, good would come for her. Or at least that she'd grow a little. Or even just realize that she has a lousy voice. Something. But hers is just one more story from those five days in Nashville. The sad part is that it probably isn't even that unusual a story.