Review of Nashville (1975) by Kevin — 03 May 2008

Well, let's see: the songs suck and the singing sucks; not a good start for a movie Altman himself has called a musical. Though I've been there a number of times and know various people in the industry, I'm no expert on the town of Nashville. But I can tell you this: despite its little in-jokes about Pig Robbins and about the Exit/Inn, this movie seems to me to be made from an uninformed outsider's perspective on the town, i.e., what an insider might refer to as a "Yankee" perspective. The contemporary meaning of the term in this context has nothing to do with the Civil War; it's just a term often used to refer to any limp-wristed, white-bread folks (be they from the North or the South) with no "soul" who just do not get the appeal of shit like old George Jones records (though they may pretend to, given certain motivations) and of stir-fried collard greens and who buy Barry Manilow records or who use terms like "country and western." This, perhaps, explains why the film criticism establishment (most if not all of whom are born and bred Yanks) is so impressed by this film about the "country and western music industry" which has as its main male singing star a douche who dresses like George Jones but sings like a baritone Barry Manilow. Altman says in the featurette on the DVD that when the film was released, the real people in Nashville criticized the film for its shitty music; Altman then brags that today, in contrast to the '70s, Nashville [the movie] is very popular with the people in Nashville [the town]. This proves my point: if Altman had a clue, he'd know that's nothing to fucking brag about. The institution that was the Nashville of old sure had its flaws, but its products were worlds apart from those of today or those depicted in the film. As a portrait of that institution, then, the movie fails miserably; and the worst part is that no one--not Altman and not even, apparently, the usually perceptive Roger Ebert--seems to have any idea that this is the case.

So, does the film have merits in spite of its cluelessness about the institution it purports to depict? Sort of. The Altman camera and dialogue styles are of course on full display. Some of the characters and scenes are memorable, e.g., the Lily Tomlin sections. In terms of plot, there actually is one, and it's completely and utterly predictable. If you're going to have a world-class plot, I'm fine with that. If you're going to dispense with plot altogether, I'm fine with that, perhaps even more so. But if you're going to dispense with plot for an hour and a half and then tack on a world-class predictable dud of a plot sort of as an afterthought, I count that as a strike against you; and this is precisely what Altman and his screenwriter do here. In other words, in terms of its merely being an exercise in Altman's style, it pales in comparison to things like Short Cuts and the Player.

Finally, a note to the Elliot Goulds of the world: if you're going to play yourself in a movie, you might try not to play yourself as an a-hole. Just a thought.