Review of Nashville (1975) by Nannina G — 27 Mar 2011

Why bother setting a movie in Nashville if you make no effort at all to get the country music right. Having recently watched several movies set in the country music scene (The Thing Called Love, Crazy Heart) and having heard the songs from Country Strong I"m beginning to get the feeling that Hollywood thinks that country music is easy, just throw in some references to cowboys, whiskey and redemption and you have a country song.

It boggles my mind that Altman could make a movie set in Nashville in the 1970s, perhaps the zenith of country music, and give us music that is so blandly bad that you can't even pretend that it's supposed to be satire.

What made him think that his actors were viable songwriters? If you can't be bothered enough with verisimilitude to hire professional songwriters to write the music of characters who are supposed to be the top of Nashville then don't devote huge portions of the movie to performing the songs.

You have to respect your subject even if you're going to parody it. If you think you're shooting a sitting duck then you're going to miss your mark. Altman was great, he hit his target many times, but I'm completely baffled why he felt the need to make this movie.

The characters didn't have to be in Nashville, the politics didn't have to be in Nashville, nothing about this movie felt like it had any genuine connection to Nashville, so what do we have left? Some amusing vignettes, some dislikable characters, some coincidences that strain credulity, and an ending that instead of being thought provoking and unsettling is merely a final unrealistic, unexplained, yet wholly predictable turn in an unrealistic, inexplicable, and predictable film.