Nashville
I went to see the 4K restoration of Altman’s classic ensemble piece last night, wondering how its freewheeling approach to narrative (if that’s the word) and fly-on-the-wall style would weather our reduced attention spans these days. 160 minutes of loosely linked episodes around characters for whom we are hardly made to care, how does that suit you?
Ronee Blakley in her signature role as Barbara Jean, just before she loses it on stage in front of her fans
What struck me more than the first time I saw the film was the fact, first, that I had no trouble understanding what anyone was saying. The myths about Altman’s inaudible dialogue were laid to rest: the overlapping is such that, though disconcerting at the time, the sound mix balances the dialogue tracks so that we always hear what we need to. The second thing was the stream of consciousness-style narrative: no fades, no breaks for night time repose and a new day dawning. It’s an unremitting progress from being flung unannounced into Haven Hamilton’s recording session, to pulling back from Albuquerque’s rendition of ‘It don’t worry me’. Along the way, the film is not without longueurs, and maybe we did not need two songs each from Hamilton and Barbara Jean. However, the net effect of all these snatched observations is inescapable: Altman seems to be offering us a portrait of America just before the bicentennial, and it is a far from flattering one.
Alongside the established stars, the managers, fans, pseuds and wannabes, there is the oleaginous John Triplette (Murphy), campaign manager for a fictional presidential hopeful, who is desperate to harness some of that star power to his roadshow, in the hope of winning some of the Southern vote for the new party’s radical agenda (changing the national anthem, removing lawyers from Congress, etc.). The artists are almost uniformly adamant that they would shun political partisanship, but are tricked by Triplette. The one exception might be Hamilton (Gibson), who one senses hankers after more power than simply firing his piano player. Nevertheless, these characters have in common that they are self-serving, self-centred and motivated by success or sex. Even the fans are seen to be fickle when Barbara Jean breaks down on stage, but are seduced back by the promise of free access to the Parthenon.
The only characters we sort of feel for are Keenan Wynn’s Mr Green, whose vacuous, unfeeling niece (Duvall) seems intent merely on getting laid by as many guys as possible during the festival; Sueleen (Denton), a deluded waitress convinced she has what it takes; and Lily Tomlin’s wife of Ned Beatty’s venal fixer. At the same time, though, we kind of despise them for being so deluded, even though they do not deserve to be the human casualties of their world, since they harm no one but themselves. Scott Glenn’s marine is another we might like to get to know better, except that we discount him initially as being some kind of weirdo. Meanwhile Jeff Goldblum’s hippie (who gets no lines at all) and Barbara Harris’s runaway wife (obliviously, and hilariously, causing a traffic accident at one point) are given precious little floor space to count.
Throughout the film, Altman’s camera carefully pans and selects what it needs, allowing his expert cast to do the rest. The real killer punch might just be that last anthem, when an audience that has just witnessed a pointless assassination is cajoled into celebrating its loss of freedom in one last singalong. Perhaps it is suggested that they don’t deserve it, since they use it so poorly.
