Nashville

I have always been fascinated with Robert Altman's abilities to make art out of the ordinary, how he can put things together that don't seem to connect at first sight and how actors love to perform for him because they know they will be good - maybe better than ever. Nashville is whatever you want it to be. It's full of music, decent but with absurd lyrics. It has a strange campaign of a politician in the focus of everything but we never see that man, only hear what he has to say and boy, I don't know what's worth - the lyrics in the songs or his rants. Maybe Nashville is a satire, maybe it's a reflection on how we all like to believe in things that we should better beware of. Nashville has a basic tone of humor but is never really funny. I had to grin and smile a lot even though in the end I guess I'm rather sad that 50 years after this movie has been made the world is even worse than ever.

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.

I suppose the brilliance of "Nashville" is that almost 30 years after its initial release, Robert Altman's slice of Americana has lost none of its punch. Despite being made in the Watergate and Vietnam era, the film remains relevant as ever.

In fact, one could argue, the film's even more relevant today in this age of celebrity-worship and apathetic, gutless American media who believe missing suburban wives are more pertinent and crucial to this nation's well-being than questioning facts and our leaders' motives for waging a needless, costly war.

The film's about the politics of country music, families, stardom, search for stardom, political manipulation and populist political candidates. The unseen presidential candidate's spiel in "Nashville" could easily have been sound bites from contemporary populists; he could be seen as the cinematic trend-setter for the Ross Perots, Jesse Venturas, Howard Deans and Ralph Naders.

The film is at once a political drama, musical and documentary all effortless woven together by a master storyteller, who truly is an American treasure. In "Nashville," Altman's overlapping dialogue works to perfection as he captures this panoramic view of five days in Nashville through the eyes of two-dozen characters.

With so many characters, it's Altman's genius that he keeps this an engrossing character study. Although he tosses aside all conventions of narrative storytelling, we get to know characters better in "Nashville" than we do in many contemporary dramas with fewer characters. There's Ronee Blakley's country singer; Lily Tomlin's doting housewife and mother; Scott Glenn's caring soldier; Keith Carradine's lecherous pop star; Ned Beatty's disinterested father; Keenan Wynn's loving husband; Michael Murphy's sleazy campaigner; and Gwen Welles' sad wannabe country singer, whose scene at a political fund-raiser is heartbreaking. And Jeff Goldblum's motorcyclist and Geraldine Chaplin's Opal are the threads that weave through all the lives in this marvelous tapestry.

There are plenty of terrific songs in "Nashville" - some might complain too many - but the best are Carradine's Oscar-winning "I'm Easy" and "It Don't Bother Me." They add to the nice sense of cynicism that layers the movie.

Altman's one of the big reasons the 1970s is regarded as the greatest decade of American filmmaking. Look at just a few of his contributions in that decade - "Nashville," "MASH" (1970), "Brewster McCloud" (1970), "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" (1971), "Images" (1972) and "The Long Goodbye" (1973). His films also influence other talented filmmakers, including Alan Rudolph (who worked on Altman films) and Paul Thomas Anderson, whose storytelling style - "Boogie Nights" (1997) and "Magnolia" (1999) - clearly is Altman-inspired.

Robert Altman is an extremely divisive director in the sense that you either "get it" or you don't--and those who don't despise his work and take considerable pleasure in sneering at NASHVILLE in particular. But there is no way around the fact that it is an important film, a highly influential film, to most Altman fans his finest films, and to most series critics quite possibly the single finest film made during the whole of the 1970s.

According to the movie trailer available on the DVD release, NASHVILLE is "the damnedest thing you ever saw"--and a truer thing was never said, for it is one of those rare film that completely defies description. On one level, the film follows the lives of some twenty characters over the course of several days leading up to a political rally, lives that collide or don't collide, that have moments of success and failure, and which in the process explore the hypocrisy that we try to sweep away under the rug of American culture. If it were merely that, the film would be so much soap-opera, but it goes quite a bit further: it juxtaposes its observations with images of American patriotism and politics at their most vulgar, and in the process it makes an incredibly funny, incredibly sad, and remarkably savage statement on the superficial values that plague our society.

What most viewers find difficult about NASHVILLE--and about many Altman films--is his refusal to direct our attention within any single scene. Conversations and plot directions overlap with each other, and so much goes on in every scene that you are constantly forced to decide what you will pay attention to and what you will ignore. The result is a film that goes in a hundred different directions with a thousand different meanings, and it would be safe to say that every person who sees it will see a different film.

In the end, however, all these roads lead to Rome, or in this case to the Roman coliseum of American politics, where fame is gained or lost in the wake of violence, where the strong consume the weak without any real personal malice, and where the current political star is only as good as press agent's presentation. For those willing and able to dive into the complex web of life it presents, Altman's masterpiece will be an endlessly fascinating mirror in which we see the energy of life itself scattered, gathered, and reflected back to us. A masterpiece that bears repeated viewings much in the same way that a great novel bears repeated readings. A personal favorite and highly, highly recommended.

Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Nashville was the first "R" rated film that my father took me to see. At 14 years of age, I was many years from NYU film school, and a neophyte when it came to appreciating cinema.

I am now 39, and to date I have seen tens of thousands of films, not to mention possessing a sizable video library. Considering my love of social politics, there is not a month that goes by that I have not thought of this film for one reason or another. There are some movies that you simply see, and there are the rare few that become part of the soul.

Simply said, Nashville is a singular work of cinematic genius that has gone dreadfully under appreciated for the last 25 years. It is a film chock full of life's little (and not so little) truths; some happy, some sad...all meaningful.

Now that it is making a long overdue reappearance on DVD in it's original (and integral) widescreen format, it is my sincerest hope that people will avail themselves of the opportunity to discover this forgotten gem for themselves.

Lastly, that this film did not make the AFI's 100 great American films is an absolute sin.