“24 of your favorite stars in Nashville!” hollers the voiceover in the opening credits of Robert Altman’s consensus favorite and magnum opus. (We can ignore the fact that only 23 of the cast members acted consistently, and several members of the ensemble likely have less screen time than Elliott Gould and Julie Christie’s cameos as themselves.) Despite the opener’s intentions to function as a parody of the 1970s commercials for K-tel Records, it now looks like an instruction manual for how many people you’ll need to keep up with. Nashville finds the greatest director of ensemble casts running at full throttle, plot machinations effortlessly subsumed beneath organic movements of music and documentary, a state of the nation with all the novelistic sprawl and audiovisual beauty you could ask for. Everyone bounces off one another so easily that you don’t even notice the collisions. The opening number by the smarmy gladhander Haven Hamilton says the U.S. must be doing something right to last the titular 200 Years, but the only thing that seems to have endured is a uniquely American flavor of eccentricity, from Southern hoity-toity affectations to outsider condescension and pretensions. The Replacement Party, led by unseen demagogue Hal Philip Walker and his sleazily patronizing operative John Triplette, has come to town to begin the political-celebrity crossbreeding program — the real-life version would reach its first apex within 10 years of the film’s release with the Reagan presidency, and it hasn’t exactly stopped since. Despite his partner being a Kennedy Catholic, Haven has his own eye on the political arena and sees the Replacement Party as a golden opportunity. (His lawyer son’s secret desire to be a songwriter in his own right means there might be more than one replacement party occurring if he succeeds.)
Lily Tomlin’s Linnea Nugent might be the closest thing Nashville has to a protagonist, or at least a beating heart. Altman was always particularly sympathetic to anyone who recognized the greatness of African American music (which adds an interesting extratextual wrinkle to the conflict between the film’s two African American characters). As the only white woman in a gospel choir, she’s the perfect contrast to Haven’s phony Americana. (It’s best to ignore the fact that her choir solos are not great: cast members Ronee Blakley and Keith Carradine, along with the film’s musical supervisor Richard Baskin, had to perform double duty to train the rest of the actors playing singers into acceptability.) As the mother of two deaf children with a husband who doesn’t even make an effort with them and is likely cheating in his own right, the groundwork Altman lays in her relationship with Keith Carradine’s ladies man Tom is only rendered more poignant by how blatantly we see the latter’s skirt-chasing with his band member Mary (Cristina Raines), imposter BBC reporter Opal (Geraldine Chaplin), and groupie L.A. Joan (Shelley Duvall). All the musical numbers in Nashville serve character, and they’re hard to judge as actual music given how they were generally written by the cast and crew to be intentionally bad, which inevitably pissed off the town’s notoriously humorless music industry. If one has to only focus on three to illuminate the whole, the best choices are the deliberately insufferable patriotism anthem 200 Years and Keith Carradine’s professional-level contributions: I’m Easy and It Don’t Worry Me. The former won the Oscar and became a modest hit, but even if Carradine sings it, Tomlin is the star of the show in the context of Nashville’s finest scene thanks to her frozen expression as the realization gradually dawns on her that even this ladies’ man with a wandering eye can feel affection for her and her alone.
Nashville’s gradually dawning realizations tend to be painful and focused on the allure of celebrity. Gwen Welles’ Sueleen, an absolutely hopeless singer who’s convinced she has talent, undergoes one of the most brutal humiliations imaginable and can’t even accept some desperate tough love from her friend after the fact. (It plays alongside the I’m Easy sequence as its horrible mirror image.) Keenan Wynn’s Mr. Green tries to get L.A. Joan, his niece, to visit his sick wife, but she’s content to pal around with any man who’ll give her the time of day (including a non-speaking Jeff Goldblum on a phallic tricycle). Tom’s married bandmates Bill and Mary spend the entire film in growing contempt with one another: the former is selling out to the Replacement Party despite not actually believing in their causes, the latter is having an affair with Tom, and their chauffeur Norman wants to be friends despite none of the three liking him much. Ronee Blakley’s Barbara Jean is one of the city’s brightest stars with a cult following to match, but she keeps having collapses or breakdowns, and is in a bad marriage to her hard-driving manager Barnett. Pauline Kael’s rave review of Nashville referred to the film’s focus as “the great American popularity contest,” and Barbara Jean’s following that keeps her afloat even when she’s rambling incoherently to a captive audience inspires a lot of lust for glory. It’s what gets Sueleen to humiliate herself, Karen Black’s fellow singer Connie White to be a jealous mean girl, and Barbara Harris’ Winifred to make her own run for the crown. It also inspires two male fans to pursue her in their own ways: one benevolent, one not.
The Keith Carradine version of It Don’t Worry Me is briefly heard over the radio during the film, and people yell out for it when he performs, but it’s Winifred who gets to cover it when she delivers the final performance of the film. After a whole movie of being marginalized by her ornery yokel husband Star and the music business in general — she gets stuck performing at a racetrack earlier in the film, inevitably drowned out by the car sounds — she gets her chance to pick up the mic and holds it like she’s making a finger gun. Barbara Jean has just been shot by a deranged fan, and in one of the most sublime moments in American movies, she proceeds to get her moment to shine by leading the crowd in a sing-along. (Whether the shooting helped or hurt Hal Philip Walker’s campaign forever remains unanswered.) Real life is covered up by art once again, a new star has ascended, and the camera looks up into the cloudy daytime sky. No stars there.
Comments are closed.