Movie of the Week: NASHVILLE (Robert Altman, 1975)

There’s only one rule: keep on singing

What is there to say about Nashville that hasn’t already been said by Pauline Kael? My relationship to the movie is an especially personal one, so I’ll try. Every few years in my journey through cinema I encounter a work that expands what I previously thought possible in the medium. When I was a teenager, it was The Tree of Life (2011). In college, it was Close-Up (1990) followed by Underground (1995). Sometime after that — before it happened yet again with Ordet (1955) — the movie that changed it all was Nashville. I was already a huge fan of Altman and his unique practice when I first encountered this sprawling, dryly satirical portrait of the 1970s country music scene. But even then, nothing prepared me for the ecstasy of watching him deftly balance the stories of twenty-four distinct characters while simultaneously painting what feels like the portrait of an entire nation. (Such was the ambition of Altman’s approach that new methods of sound mixing were invented for the production, so that dozens of overlapping conversations could be recorded at once.) Altman is rightly regarded as one of cinema’s great humanists, and perhaps less recognized as a maker of epics. That’s because movies like Nashville aren’t epic in the traditional sense: they arrive at their enormous size not through lavish budgets or dizzying action, but by the sheer mass of their human element. I think of the way that a lovesick military private (Scott Glenn) — who barely has a line of dialogue in the whole picture — is given the same emotional depth as country superstar Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), the object of his devotion. Or the way that Tom (Keith Carradine), one of Nashville’s true villains, so convincingly has a hold over three far more endearing souls played by Lily Tomlin, Geraldine Chaplin, and Shelley Duvall. Just when you’re starting to choke up as an aspiring singer realizes, in the most humiliating way possible, that she has no talent, Jeff Goldblum shows up once again on his chopper like some creature from a perverse American mythology. You won’t have time to laugh, though, because the next gut-punch is coming. Stars fade, and a new dreamer picks up the mic. As she sings for a massive Replacement Party rally (Altman and screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury also predicted MAGA), you remember that certain kinds of hope are only possible through music — and also that there’s some truth to the American ethos that anyone can be anything. Jean–Luc Godard once described Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) as life in 90 minutes. In that spirit, I’d say Nashville is America in 160.

Available for rent on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and other major platforms.