"Nashville" (1975)

 

Last Saturday, November 7, Joe Biden was declared the winner of the US Presidential Election.  The coronavirus altered the nature of this election, in which millions chose to vote by mail, and in-person voting was complicated by the need for protective face-covering and social distancing, which were unfairly construed by many misguided Americans to be political acts in themselves. 

A divided country chose the winner by more votes than any other president has ever earned.   It seemed appropriate, on this politically historic occasion, to revisit one of American cinema’s most exhilarating and challenging films, Robert Altman’s “Nashville”.

The same day as the election was called for Biden, Americans filled the streets in an unprecedented release of celebration, while the number of reported covid-19 cases was at an all-time high.  The elation over the change in American leadership, simultaneously with the anxiety of a worsening pandemic due to the incumbent’s incompetence, made “Nashville” a meaningful choice for my post-election viewing.   Forty-five years after it was first released, this film remains a prophetic metaphor for America’s collective anxiety, celebration, and confusion.

How to describe “Nashville”?  What is it about?  On the surface, it’s part episodic comedy-drama, part concert film.  It is a chronicle of five days in the country music capital of the world, leading up to a political rally/concert for an enigmatic Replacement Party candidate named Hal Phillip Walker.

Like a series of snapshots of America just before its Bicentennial, “Nashville” chronicles twenty-four characters, whose lives touch, move apart, intersect in interesting ways, and come together in the film’s finale. 

It is during the sequence at the political rally that the film reaches a stunning climax; and then it ends.  We are left in a state of ambiguity, a roller-coaster of horror mixed with hope.

It is more accurate to describe “Nashville” as an epic and multilayered character study.  There are country music stars, hangers-on, and wanna-be singers; politicians and promoters; spouses and children; families struggling through a generational inability to communicate; heroes and impostors, soldiers and rednecks, angels and assassins. 

It is impossible to give enough credit to the actors who embody these characters, many of whom created their own costumes and wrote and performed their own songs.  Worth special note are Henry Gibson and Lily Tomlin in their film debuts (Gibson as the arrogant country star Haven Hamilton; and Tomlin as Linnea, a lonely mother of two deaf children, and the sole white singer in a Black gospel choir); Ned Beatty as Tomlin’s husband, a smarmy attorney; and best of all, songwriter Ronee Blakley in the crucial role of Barbara Jean, a beloved country singer on the brink of collapse.

Also terrific are Keith Carradine (who wrote and performs the Oscar-winning “I’m Easy”) as a talented but womanizing member of a rock trio; Keenan Wynn as the kind uncle of the promiscuous “L.A. Joan” (Shelley Duvall); Geraldine Chaplin as the dubious BBC reporter, who is our wacky surrogate of sorts;  Michael Murphy as Hal Philip Walker’s slick promoter; Robert Doqui as a hard-drinking, cynical black man who resents the success of black country singer Tommy Brown (ex-football-player Timothy Brown); and Gwen Welles as Sueleen and Barbara Harris as Albuquerque, two aspiring singers of questionable talent, who encounter failure and fame in very surprising ways.

These characters move through a world of iconic ideas and images: a world of Black pride and racial tension; of talent and disability (sometimes one and the same); of infidelity and devotion; of traffic jams and race-cars, school buses and auto junkyards, rooming houses and country estates, hospitals and airports; of church services and motel room trysts.

Moving in a cycle from honky-tonks to the Grand Old Opry and back, it’s a world that culminates beneath the columns of Nashville’s Parthenon (a replica of the ancient Greek monument to Democracy) under an enormous American flag, waving to the rhythm of Barbara Jean’s soulful tribute to her Idaho home. 

There are many songs in “Nashville”, patriotic, nostalgic, cornball, seductive, and heartbreaking, that form the movie’s upbeat soundtrack, and which are essential to the film’s fabric, mood, and message. No other movie feels quite like “Nashville”, due in large part to its music.

Running through, like a thread that can’t be pulled lest it all unravel, is Hal Phillip Walker's  campaign truck with loudspeakers, roaming the streets, blaring the candidate’s platform in his own voice, weaving through characters and events.  Although no one pays much attention, Walker’s ideas sound less crazy today than in they did in 1975: fighting oil companies; removing lawyers from congress; taxing churches; changing the National Anthem; and abolishing the electoral college.

The film is like a tapestry of America at a crossroads after Vietnam, Watergate, and political and cultural upheaval of the era, seen in bits and pieces of disparate behaviors and situations, slowly coming together in a panoramic conclusion.  Instead of a clearly defined picture taking shape before us, we get something more ambiguous: a contradictory, poetic sequence that almost defies description in words.  It leaves us with residual, conflicting emotions that are at once both despairing and exultant--just like our fractured country today, fighting a pandemic after an historic election.

“Nashville” is also a pointed satire about the cult of celebrity, the fleetingness of success, and of the dangerous convergence of politics and celebrity.  It also takes a critical and often hilarious look at advertising and self-promotion in the parallel worlds of country music and politics.  The movie’s opening credit sequence is a wonderful parody of the old K-Tel record commercials on TV, like an advertisement for the film itself even as the narrator says it will be presented “without commercial interruption”.

In the glorious movie renaissance of the early 1970s, audiences became more active participants in a film, willing to bring their own energy and vigilance to watch the entire screen carefully, to listen more acutely, and interpret symbols and images in a more literary way.  Our active attention was often rewarded with an entertaining and artistic experience that lasted far beyond the initial viewing.  It stirred our emotions, challenged our thinking, moved us to action, and stimulated heated conversation about a film’s deeper implications for our lives.

“Nashville” was the culmination of that Hollywood renaissance, which was a creative ferment in reaction to the turmoil of the era. Audiences came to accept characters over plot, downbeat endings, cinematic innovation, grittier technique, violent images in service to a higher purpose, and more realistic subject matter that reflected our world.

I fear that American audiences no longer know how to watch a movie like “Nashville”, which needs a viewer’s active attention to be fully enjoyed and appreciated.  The seemingly haphazard, freewheeling style makes it challenging to keep track of the myriad characters and relationships at first; but director Robert Altman, screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury, editor Sidney Levin, and a marvelous cast soon create a familiar world that becomes easier to relax into as the movie goes along.

There is a pattern to what at first seems to be a liberating kind of chaos on the screen: the subtle, red-white-and-blue color scheme; the imperceptible, painterly movement of the camera (especially the zoom lens for emphasis); the carefully layered episodes showcasing the characters in combination with each other; and the experimental use of an 8-track sound recording system, which offers bits of exposition, offhand dialogue, and political commentary, sometimes all at once.  Even a careful viewer might need two or three viewings to take it all in.  By the final hour of this 156-minute masterwork, the movie has taken shape, and we become deeply involved.

The skill with which Robert Altman delivers this classic piece of cinema becomes obvious in the final sequence at the Parthenon, in which almost every character, major or minor, has gathered with the crowd to participate in the political event.  After mere glimpses of these people living their lives and making us laugh and think, we marvel at how well we have come to know them, and how completely Altman has created a world that we have become a part of.  Even late in the movie, some of the characters have a few surprises left to reveal.

That’s why the shocking climactic act, and its aftermath, are so confounding, and its impact so powerful, and even exhilarating.  While nothing is spelled out, and the future of these characters remains open-ended, we have enough material to complete the narrative and draw our own conclusions. The more you can bring to the film, the richer the experience is.

“Nashville” elicits emotions similar to what we might feel after a national tragedy, and/or the emergence of a new leader.  The film ends with the crowd joining in to sing a song.  The refrain, sung repeatedly before the fade-out, “it don’t worry me”, is rich with ambiguity, and speaks convincingly to the conflicting ignorance/resilience of a people in the midst of a crisis.  When children in the crowd are shown singing this refrain even without understanding what has happened, and police are briefly seen moving through the crowd, the implications, while chilling, can be interpreted in different ways.

What makes “Nashville” a great film is its epic scope, its continued relevance, and its capacity to surprise us.  It combines many contradictory ideas and personal stories into something that captures the ever-changing American landscape.  If you immerse yourself in it, give yourself over to its unconventional methods, and watch and listen carefully, you won’t find a more original, unusually entertaining movie as “Nashville”.