It Don't Worry Me...

NASHVILLE

Nashville is not the best written film of all time, but it is perhaps the most successful at convincing us that it is not written. Here's a movie bursting at the seams with over 30 characters and jam-packed with at least ten full-length musical performances and almost three hours in length. But yet each individual moment seems startlingly spontaneous; every action these people take seems like an extension of their gloriously idiosyncratic personas instead of a function of the screenwriter's sweaty-palmed desire to move the story along. You'd think Robert Altman's pitiless, perceptive Polaroid of red-state, post-Watergate America would've aged like cheap milk, but, as with many immortal works of art, this one finds astonishing universality in its specificity.

The plot? Non-existent. There's a presidential convention going on in Nashville, and the camera weaves in and out of concert mobs, plants itself in the back of smoke-choked bars, lurks in the corners of sad little hotel rooms and houses, giving us brief, biting vignettes of the people who happen to be in town at the time and what they're up to. Scenes flash past with blink-and-you'll-miss-it brevity-a gospel singer (Lily Tomlin) converses with her deaf son, a whacked-out patriot (Henry Gibson) labors over the production of a trite bicentennial tribute, a gaga BBC reporter (Geraldine Chaplin) ambles around a junkyard mumbling gibberish into her tape recorder, an Opry starlet (Ronee Blake, best in show) has an onstage meltdown and so on. And, thank god, in no way do all these little pieces add up to some soppy sobriquet about how We're All Really The Same (o hai, Crash!)

Of course, infinite praise is due Joan Tewkesbury's screenplay, a marvel of structural ingenuity. It show us the struggles of these sad, strange individuals while addressing the problems that plague our country at large. The storytelling here doesn't mask the social commentary; it is the social commentary. One of my favorite moments in the picture comes at the beginning of songstress Connie White's (Karen Black) Opry performance. Working the crowd, she gives an autograph and a photo-op to a young boy flanking the stage. "Study real hard!", she proclaims, "You can be the next president!" But her ad-lib flops; there's a smattering of golf-clapping and then a moment of devastating silence before she launches into her first song. Within about half-a-minute, Tewkesbury has planted two questions in our head. First of all, what place do Connie and her music-patriotic to the hilt-have in an age of irony and countercultural sprawl? But just after our heart breaks for her, a second thought comes to mind: What's wrong with our country when the phrase "You can be the next president" seems more like a threat than a compliment? Moments like this one abound in Nashville. You find yourself in a pleasant predicament; you want to run out of the theater now now now and discuss these pearls of wisdom with everyone, but you also hope the picture will run forever, will keep getting at more and more of what makes America American and humans all too human.

The other unique aspect of the script is rather sad; it is, to this day, one of the only major Hollywood classics penned by a woman. As such, the film's portrayal of American women is deeper, angrier, and more honest than most any other. Roger Ebert says it best; "They are prized for their talent, their beauty, their services in bed, but never once in this movie for themselves." Tewkesbury gets at a sad truth here. It's not that men don't praise women; even worse, we praise them for the wrong things. We extol their looks, skills, and sensual prowess so often that some of them begin to think those are the only aspects worth improving. Look at Sueleen (Gwen Welles), a talentless singer who hits paydirt because she's willing to strip when she sings. Or Martha (Shelley Duvall), whose all-consuming desire for physical intimacy sidetracks her journey to the sickbed of a dying relative. Or, for Tewkesbury's most piercing evocation of sexual cruelty, watch the film's most famous scene-insolent but ingenious folk-rocker Tom Frank (Keith Carradine) serenades a bar full of women. He has slept with all of them. He loves none of them. They have come because they believe that after the show, he might, just might, take them home. By objectifying their appearances and tuning out their personalities, he has created in them a want that can neither be fulfilled nor forgotten.

If the script's the tinder, Robert Altman's the match. Ah, the Altman Style, perhaps the most distinctive directorial touch in movie history! Not only would he encourage his actors to riff on the written dialogue (causing many a screenwriter many a conniption), but he'd often station the characters (and his camera) in the midst of a crowd, then encourage extras and ensemble members to have in-depth conversations of their own-and talk over the leads! By refusing to a) provide meat-and-potatoes plot-pusher dialogue or b) hone in on one particular exchange, Altman makes you work. You must listen up, you must choose what's important and why. You can watch Nasvhille three or four or five times and focus on different strands of conversation, different people on the fringes of the frame. By broadening the soundtrack and the shot angles, Altman brilliantly refutes the moronic-but-abiding notion that a movie must mean the one thing to all people. The picture is a Homeric odyssey, with you as Odysseus; each viewer has an individual journey, as opposed to the conventional group experience. You know I like a movie that believes in its audience. This picture is one giant cinematic trust fall.

Now that I've devoted a full paragraph of idolatry to Altman, it's time I turned my attention to the cast. Students of performance would be wise to check this one out. I don't know what combination of written word and internal choice was involved, but here are thespians entirely devoid of vanity. Take Blake's work, for example. The role of a country diva collapsing under the enormity of her self-sustained legend offers enormous showboating potential. Instead, as a disturbed person would be more likely to do, she plays her character with the frenzied desperation of someone trying to pass as sane, and when she does lapse into delirium, it is petty and pathetic. There are myriad examples of such note-perfect realism here-by staying true to even the ugliest impulse, these actors endear us to their characters twice as much as if they'd attempt to make them "sympathetic". Appropriate for this tough-love classic, a timeless portrait of tortured souls caught in the sometimes treacherous, sometimes triumphant act of surprising themselves-and us.

Oh, and one more thing. During the making of Nashville, one of the great apocryphal stories of cinematic folklore was born. As Altman geared up to shoot the final scene, he was over-budget, over-drugged, and caught in the midst of a brewing storm. At the end of his rope, he shut off the camera, stretched out his arms, and yelled "STOP RAINING!". The rain, knowing a great director when it heard one, did just that. Or so the story goes.