Robert Altman (1975)
From start to finish, Robert Altman gives country music both satirical treatment and its emotional due, and keeps revealing unexpected sides to his large cast of characters. Nashville opens in a studio, where Grand Ole Opry star Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) is recording a patriotic anthem in celebration of the impending Bicentennial. The song’s refrain – ‘we must be doin’ somethin’ right to last 200 years’ – and plenty more of its earnest lyrics are funny, though the singer doesn’t mean them to be. The tune is unarguably stirring. Haven repeatedly interrupts the recording to chastise one of the session musicians, using a viperish tone of voice very different from his singing one: for most of Nashville, the ardent piety of his persona on stage contrasts sharply with his hard-nosed egotism off it. In the film’s climax, he appears with the psychologically fragile Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), Nashville’s sweetheart, at a gala concert on the steps of the Parthenon in the city’s Centennial Park. Shots are fired at the stage; Barbara Jean falls unconscious to the ground. Haven is hit in the arm but bravely insists on returning to reassure the audience. ‘Y’all take it easy now,’ he tells them, ‘this isn’t Dallas – it’s Nashville! They can’t do this to us here in Nashville!’ One of Haven’s signature numbers, included in his Opry set, is ‘Keep A-Goin’’ (‘When it looks like all is up/Keep a-goin’!/Drain the sweetness from the cup/Keep a-goin’!’) and he finally proves good as his word. C&W cheer and ‘real’ life turn out to be less easily divisible than we assumed, though we might have guessed. Pint-sized Haven Hamilton always wears a white, rhinestone-encrusted cowboy outfit, whether officially performing or not.
The gala concert is also the climax of events around a political campaign in the city. Hal Philip Walker, the ‘Replacement Party’ candidate, who has caused a stir in several primaries for the 1976 US presidential election, is visiting Nashville. He never appears on screen but John Triplette (Michael Murphy), his national organiser, is in evidence, along with Walker’s voice (belonging to Thomas Hal Phillips), via radio broadcasts and a campaign van megaphone. Wheeler-dealer Triplette, with a TV background and an idea of what they mean to the local community, keeps working to engage country music performers to appear at the big Parthenon event. If they’re hesitant he gives them empty assurances this doesn’t mean they’re expressing political support for the candidate. (The Parthenon stage is, of course, emblazoned with pro-Walker banners – to the fury of Barnett (Allen Garfield), Barbara Jean’s naively protective husband and manager.) There’s a double meaning to Haven Hamilton’s ‘this isn’t Dallas – it’s Nashville’. Given the synergy of politics and show business in the place, it makes sense that the eventual target of an assassination attempt isn’t the invisible Walker or one of his henchmen but a C&W star.
The gala line-up doesn’t only include established country names like Barbara Jean and Haven. There’s the gospel choir which, at the start of the film, was recording in a different part of the same studio where Haven was laying down ‘200 Years’. There are Mary (Cristina Raines) and Tom (Keith Carradine), two thirds of a popular folk trio visiting Nashville to record an album. The remaining third, Bill (Allan Nicholls), Mary’s husband, isn’t on stage with them, after finding out that his wife, like plenty of other women in the course of the story, has been sleeping with Tom. Also at the Parthenon are the wannabes – American Dreamers – who feature prominently in Joan Tewkesbury’s screenplay. They include Winifred (Barbara Harris), who, at the outset, emerged from a pile-up of cars on the outskirts of Nashville, fleeing her husband (Bert Remsen) in order to pursue her country singer ambitions. These get nowhere fast: we witness Winifred’s unsuccessful performance on a stage at stock car races attended by Haven’s family and others. Sueleen (Gwen Welles), a waitress in the airport café, is undaunted by her inability to hold a tune. We see and hear her practising in the mirror, protected by other voices in a church choir and, at a men-only Walker fund-raiser, getting booed off before Triplette and Delbert Reese (Ned Beatty), a local organiser for the campaign (and Haven Hamilton’s lawyer), persuade her to go back onstage and do a striptease. This time Sueleen gets rowdy cheers from the audience and a ‘slot’ at the gala, which consists of standing uselessly on the margins.
Winifred and Sueleen aren’t – or maybe aren’t – the only fantasists in the film. It’s to be hoped, anyway, that Opal (Geraldine Chaplin), a verbally incontinent Englishwoman who claims to be making a documentary for the BBC, is as deluded in this belief as Winifred and Sueleen are in theirs. If not, this lone non-American among the main characters, stands out like a sore thumb and as a gratingly silly caricature. The characters with big ideas in Nashville could also be said to include the potential assassins. There’s only one political candidate in town but more than one candidate for nobody-turning-lethal-somebody – though the gunman in question isn’t a nonentity for the film viewer but a young man whose private anguish goes unnoticed by those around him. True, it’s something of a sick joke that lonely Kenny Frasier (David Hayward) always carries a violin case which turns out to contain his weapon but he’s not the obvious prime suspect. That appears to be Glenn Kelly (Scott Glenn), a Vietnam veteran and avowed Barbara Jean fanatic; in the event, it’s Glenn who disarms Kenny at the Parthenon to prevent his doing further damage. A third, more senior possibility among the quiet guys is the hapless Mr Green (Keenan Wynn), first seen visiting his beloved, dying wife in hospital. He’s joined there by their niece Martha (Shelley Duvall), a teenage groupie who quickly makes clear her real purpose in visiting Nashville. Kenny rents a room from Mr Green and accompanies him to his wife’s funeral, where his niece is conspicuous by her absence. In the audience at the Parthenon, Kenny sees Martha with Bill.
Nashville is hard to categorise – a ‘satirical musical ensemble comedy-drama film’, according to Wikipedia, which also quotes a 1995 academic article in American Quarterly that ‘compared the film to “a poststructuralist theoretical text”, adding that “it invites, indeed valorizes, contradiction and seems designed to resist closure” ’. Watching it again (for the third or fourth time, all told), I was more than ever aware of what a terrific, one-of-a-kind musical this is. Geoff Andrew, writing in Sight & Sound (June 2021), reminds us that Altman ‘invited anyone playing a singer to write their own songs’, involving Richard Baskin, his young musical director, as necessary. (Baskin makes a cameo appearance as the session musician excoriated by Haven Hamilton in the opening sequence.) The results, thanks to the double-edged treatment of C&W mentioned at the start of this note, and the quality of the performers, are often exhilarating. So too is the montage of snatches of Sunday music heard at a Catholic mass, a service at a Black Baptist church, and in the hospital chapel, where the convalescent Barbara Jean sings from her wheelchair, to a gathering including Mr Green and Glenn Kelly. ‘200 Years’, ‘For the Sake of the Children’ (another Haven number), ‘I’m Easy’ (which won Keith Carradine the film’s one Oscar) – the standout numbers in Nashville are the best original compositions in any musical of the era bar Saturday Night Fever.
Those listening to the songs make a strong impression too. Altman does justice to the devotion and the fickle demands of the on-screen audiences. They’re at first concerned but soon restless and dissatisfied when Barbara Jean, after her discharge from hospital but still in no fit state to perform, attempts a comeback at the Opryland theme park, starts rambling between numbers and is anxiously escorted by Barnett from the stage. When Tom sings ‘I’m Easy’ in the club owned by Haven’s companion Lady Pearl (Barbara Baxley), it’s a dramatic, even more than a musical, highlight of the film: Keith Carradine sings nicely; the face of Lily Tomlin’s Linnea Reese, as it dawns that the words of the song are addressed to her, reacts to it unforgettably. It’s probably invidious to single out any member of the Nashville ensemble but I do think Tomlin is outstanding. Linnea, as well as the only white face in the gospel choir, is Delbert’s wife; the Reeses’ home life is just about the only one shown and they’re the parents of the only significant children in the film. Jimmy Reese (James Dan Calvert) and his sister Donna (Donna Denton) are both deaf. There’s an incisive scene in which they talk with their parents, Linnea engaging completely with the kids, Delbert preoccupied with the imminent arrival of John Triplette. The Reese family unit grounds the political and musical calculations of the place in demanding domestic reality. Ned Beatty also does fine work in conveying this.
The roles of the main singers are expertly done. Henry Gibson’s rodent-like Haven is a brilliant creation. In terms of both voice and physical presence, Ronee Blakley’s brittle delicacy contrasts beautifully with the sleek, businesslike glamour of Barbara Jean’s rival, Connie White (Karen Black). A character called White portrayed by an actress called Black naturally brings to mind the racial balance of the cast. There is one performer of colour at the Grand Ole Opry – he’s played by Timothy Brown and perhaps inspired by Charley Pride. The only man that treats Sueleen decently, though he can’t really help her, is Wade (Robert DoQui), a Black cook at the airport restaurant. Linnea may be racially lonely in the choir but she’s usually at the forefront of the group. Without pushing the point, Altman makes clear that African Americans are in no sense top of the bill.
Shortly before the attack on the Parthenon stage, Altman and his DP Paul Lohmann deliver a memorable shot of the huge American flag above the stage, shifting slightly but ominously in the breeze. In the confusion that follows the shooting, the microphone ends up in the hand of Winifred. She starts singing ‘It Don’t Worry Me’ (also by Keith Carradine), accompanied by the gospel choir and, in due course, the whole crowd. The chorus is repeated over and over until it fades out as the camera moves up into a blue sky, the last image in the film. The finale to Nashville is more satirical allegory than realistic: even allowing that the assassin has been wrestled to the ground, it’s unlikely the show would go on, in any form, or that the audience en masse would blithely keep a-goin’ (or be allowed to be: there’s no sign of police to take charge). But Altman has earned this flourish.
The film’s 160 minutes pass very quickly indeed. The action, spanning just a few days, concerns a particular place in America in a particular year but this Bicentennial picture, watched today, isn’t frozen in time (as M*A*S*H now seems to be); the culture of a specific city that it describes, convinces as an American paradigm. I embarked on BFI’s Altman retrospective with the idea that this was his best film. Approaching the end of the season (and with several films I’d not previously seen under my belt), I now see Nashville as streets ahead of anything else Robert Altman has done. That may sound like damning with faint praise, given what I’ve had to say recently about other pieces of his work, but this film remains as richly entertaining as it’s conceptually unique.
25 June 2021
