DVD Tuesdays: Nashville — It's Not Just About Music
I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.
As I was watching
Bobby last week (a movie that, by the way, I like rather better than most reviewers, its reach outstrips its grasp, but isn't ambition a
good thing?) I couldn't keep my mind off
Robert Altman's
Nashville (1975), a model for successful multistrand narratives. It's one of my favorite films ever; I saw it when it opened at a now-vanished theater called the Baronet, I showed it regularly during the five years I taught film history/theory/criticism, and after all those viewings it retains the power to chill me with its distillation of the heart-wrenching gulf between ideals and actions, between dreams and the grubby day-to-day reality of making it from sunrise to sunset without drowning in the troubles of the world.
I know what you're thinking: You don't really like country music. Doesn't matter. I don't either - Nashville isn't about country music. Regularly cited as one of the most influential films of the '70s, it's been characterized as the quintessential portrait of post-Vietnam War/Watergate America, but the reason it remains so bitterly relevant is that its underlying concern is the way pop culture smoothes and shapes vivid, inchoate longings into tidy manageable tropes, and the cost of surrender to those prefabricated dreams.
Altman juggles 24 characters, ranging from old-school country stars like
Henry Gibson's Haven Hamilton and steel magnolia Connie White (B-movie regular
Karen Black) to country-pop crossover artist Tom Frank (
Keith Carradine), bedraggled housewife Winifred (
Barbara Harris), who's abandoned her husband in search of stardom, L.A. groupie Joan (
Shelley Duvall), and sundry hangers-on. Their stories play out against the grassroots presidential campaign of independent candidate Hal Phillip Walker, whose team is trying to entice fragile C&W legend Barbara Jean (
Ronee Blakley), who's barely recovered from one nervous breakdown and well on her way to another, to do a concert on his behalf. Altman's cast not only sing - some extremely well, including Black and Carradine, whose "I'm Easy" became a bona fide hit - but also wrote their own material, with an assist from music supervisor Richard Baskin. Altman is the master of the multithread narrative, but Nashville was lightning in a bottle: He's never matched, let alone topped, it. I couldn't help but see 2006's
A Prairie Home Companion as
Nashville's pale shadow, and
Meryl Streep's character, iron butterfly Yolanda Johnson, as a less tragically vulnerable Barbara Jean.
The notion of destiny vs happenstance underlies all multithread narratives, from
Grand Hotel (1932) to last year's surprise Oscar-winner,
Crash. Is everything that happens to us part of a larger design? Or is it as Shakespeare writes in
King Lear: "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport."
One critic suggested that the fact that
Nashville's actors were able to write creditable C&W songs was evidence that country music is reductive and formulaic. Yes or no?
Nashville explores the intersection of entertainment and politics. Are people more sophisticated about that relationship than they used to be?
Altman is famous for his use of overlapping dialogue. Does having actors talk over one another actually duplicate the ebb and flow of real-life conversation, or is it just another form of stylization?
