Robert Altman's 1975 "Nashville"
Robert Altman’s cinema, his delicate understanding of losers and outcasts, can be summed up in one shot in Nashville (1975). At the Exit/In club, four women listen to a song they each think they inspired. Three have slept with the sullen, cruel country star (Keith Carradine) whom they think is personally serenading them from the stage. As the boy plays this earworm (the Oscar-winning “I’m Easy”), it becomes clear to his strung-along singing partner (Cristina Raines) and the spaced-out groupie who looks like Olive Oyl of the White Panthers (Shelley Duvall) that he is not pouring his heart out to them but to the gospel singer in white glued to the way, way back (Lily Tomlin). Yet what lingers in the mind is the cosmic reaction of Geraldine Chaplin—as Opal, the star-struck English chatterbox who may or may not work for the BBC. For 99% of the film, she is Banal Media incarnate, a dithering (some say “hollow”) type of a type who has made up her mind long before she raises her microphone to make yet another pretentious observation: “It’s pure Bergman! Of course, the people are all wrong for Bergman…” But in this seven-second shot, a lightning storm of emotions illuminates Opal’s face. She transmits a tear-inducing smile, the kind expressed when you see a shard of yourself reflected in a work of art. She beams, basking in the glow of having felt noticed and elevated. Then, for an eternity of seconds, she is overcome by a serious pensiveness which we haven’t seen in any of her scenes of scablike parody, underlined by one last smirking twitch of the mouth: I helped create this. Nowhere else is Opal’s cluelessness so crushing, so tragic. With the gasp-inducing speed of the greatest actor-artists, Chaplin shades in all the turbulent inner life that might have seemed distant from her leech-like reporter, and Altman in his casual, actor-first wisdom allows this moment to unfold—unheralded, unsignaled, but there—for all of us to relate. Even Opal he can’t let exist as a flat joke. Such is the surprising give-and-take in Altman.
*
Nashville is a panoramic view of the Nashville music business in 1975. The story is told over 5 days, as 24 main characters go about their business in the country-music Mecca, in preparation for a political rally on the fifth day. There's a waitress, Sueleen Gay (Gwen Welles) who wants to desperately sing at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville; the only problem is that she's a terrible singer. There's a folk trio—Bill (Allan Nichols), Mary (Cristina Raines), and Tom (Keith Carradine)—where everybody's cheating on everybody else with some chattery other. There's an old uncle (Keenan Wynn) who flies in from Los Angeles to attend to his wife on her deathbed; his niece comes along (Shelley Duvall), but she just wants to be a groupie. There's a psychofreak on a tricycle who gives rides to unsuspecting hitchhikers. There's a mousy blonde woman (Barbara Harris) who just wants to sing to a big crowd of people, but can't seem to find the audience, because she's on-the-run from her redneck trucker husband. At the end, these electric, zig-zagging personalities all converge at the Parthenon in Nashville, where the presidential rally/concert for the independent presidential candidate Hal Philip Walker takes place.
Manny Farber accuses Nashville of elephantitis, but restless leg syndrome is its bigger sin. Trying to pin itself down to one huge statement ("America: #1 in kooks, kitsch, and killing"), Nashville ends up finding a sweet, irrational release of joy-filled, humanist movement. The bigness of the 24-person cast's sweep across the urban terrain of Nashville, the smallness of a termite gesture like Ned Beatty's half-fastened white belt looped around his potbelly. More than any other Altman film, Nashville teeters with just the right amount of dexterity between acidic takedown and sweet build-up.
Everyone in Nashville has "the Moment." A previously cartooned caricature will, in one grand moment of clarity, suddenly approach humanness, complexity, empathy. A few choice examples:
Barbara Jean (real-life country artist Ronee Blakley) starts off disembarking a cramped Nashville private-jet as a sickeningly daown-tah-earth kewpie doll, whose roly-poly hubbie Barnett (Allen Garfield as a Nixon-era update on W.C. Fields) keeps her pinned up by praise and, perhaps, pills. She receives undying adoration. Fans from the left and the right unite for “our Barbara Jean.” But later, we get a glimpse into the couple’s private lives: he is an abuser, munching lazily on Kentucky Fried Chicken apple pies as he slightly raises his voice (never out-of-control; no need for that, his disappointed, fat hunch will do) for "goin' nutso on me," questioning "are you havin' one of them nervous breakdowns again?" She's lit in this heartbreaking grey moonlight—like the subject of a backdoor Caravaggio, the room shrouded in a musky black, swallowed by her externalized inner night-terrors—as she collapses on her bed, emitting guttural animal shrieks, trying to make that dull aching in her brain go away. Her enamel cracks away—but Altman’s camera privileges her perspective over everything else, the sense that we are in it with her, we descend as she descends.
Cristina Raines is the unsung member of Nashville’s 3 Wounded Women. Next to the flashy breakdowns of Ronee Blakley and Gwen Welles’s cringe-y lack of self-consciousness, Raines can seem to fade into the loud Nashville din of constant crashes, mumbling, political stumping. But focus on her singularly hip under-emoting. Raines and her character refuse the privilege of being a main heavy (Blakley, Gibson's midget diva, Tomlin's gospel singer, Carradine's asshole) or a perverse, cartooned weirdie (Chaplin, Goldblum's Trike-Guy, Wynn's hard-of-hearing geezer, Duvall's groupie). Instead, Raines is able to act from within a safely hushed, undeclamatory, termite range. Altman’s camera zoom-glides into her and Tom’s faces after sex—her dazed glaze, his half-asleep comfort—nudging as near as it can, the zoom lens ensuring a psychological closeness with a respectful, physical detachment. Vibrations of that one gooey-nougety moment ripple across the next few scenes: a mirror scrawled with “I love you,” the passive-aggressive bitchiness of the husband (“Get up, goddammit!”, he says as he pops a balloon-in-her-sleeping-face with his cig) as she gives him the cold shoulder right back. Then there’s her restless, shaking hand—uncontrollable—thumb, index, middle finger tapping frantically on the table, when she’s realized the man she’s convulsively in love with (scumbag Tom, played to equally scummy perfection by Keith Carradine) has slept with another, and was it ever good. Realizing that she holds no special privilege in his life, Mary confronts the brutal truth that she never really mean anything to a fragile mini-man like “Easy” Tom. Singing “Since You’ve Gone, My Heart is Broken Another Time,” Raines looks stone-cold-dead-center into Tom’s dullard eyes, flinging and flaunting and clarifying her womanhood in his face. Ever the petulant child, he returns the retort: “Hey, you forgot your jacket!,” flinging it as if chastised by mommy and unable to comprehend. (Of course, only a minutes later, he starts playing “I’m Easy” and shows a completely new layer we didn’t know he had in him.) Trampled on by her lover, ignored by her husband, a female in a testosterone-raging world of guys doing guy things, a registered Democrat—Raines-as-Mary quickly becomes one of the choicest humans with whom I can find comfort in shared loneliness.
Another key player: Gwen Welles as a pretty clueless waitress who can’t sing, consistently the character who most attracts my empathy and attention. It is her foolhardy insistence that she can be as great as Sueleen that endears Americans to her—those who believe, rather pathetically, in the concept that “with enough pluck and grit, you can do anything!” Sueleen Gay (“if she’s half as provocative as her name, we’re in the clear) is a daddy’s girl (he probably bought Sueleen her first Haven Hamilton record), growing up under nicens religious tutelage. The room where she practices being a star is a wildly imaginative potpourri of lava lamps, plastic Jesïi, black-and-white Mother Mary’s, Barbara Jean photos cut out from some cheap 10-cent magazine, and a hideous baby-blue wall that suggests she’s slept here since nursery days. (Thank Heaven for Little Girls?) Altman and Welles play up the completely comic lack of self-awareness of this less rich Florence Foster Jenkins in the first few reels. Despite spending so much time stuffing her bra to accentuate her nips, copping her sense of sexy from Marilyn Monroe and Dolly Parton, Sueleen’s weirdly “pure” in her intentions. For instance, when her lack of talent lands her a hard-earned gig at a benefit dinner, she giddily cries offscreen, “I don’t care about the money!” It’s one of the few genuine, un-pretentious moments of ecstasy from a Nashville musician. (Unusual, since such moments are only reserved for either Lily Tomlin’s gospel singer or Ronee Blakley’s fractured country star.) Such integrity only gets glimpsed in flashes, but is never sustained in Altman’s film’s foreground, for it is always being relegated to a murky background, where an individual’s wackiness threatens to be swallowed up in the wonderfully abrasive noise of Altman’s grotesque soundscape.
Next to Raines’ tapping on a table, Welles’ striptease sequence is just about the most awkward, heartbreaking, and cringeworthy moment of Nashville. It takes her two songs before she realizes the men gathered in this room don’t care about her voice; they only want her body. Unsure what to do, confronted with a sacrifice of her personal integrity for sexual gratification, Sueleen backs into a corner, insisting “I’m a singer...I’m a singer…” with her tearful voice and with those hunted, haunted eyes. Here, Altman shows up what can only be described as a particularly insidious form of toxic masculinity—literally embodied by a bunch of rowdy cowboy-hat wearing white dudes screaming “Take it off, sweetie,” Trump-style. Altman refuses to let our eyes waver as Sueleen is forced to do that striptease. (“I do this, and I get to sing with Barbara Jean at the Parthenon, right?”) Altman’s camera is solemn and venomous in equal doses; perched from two dumpy angles, a medium- and a long-shot with no sexy pinache, Altman never vulgarly encroaches upon Sueleen’s body but also refuses to let the male audience member off the hook. The males are witness to a failure of so many types of humanity, despite certain members of them (Bashful Bud Hamilton) being shown to be kind of sweetie pies on the sly. No matter, because when Bud becomes a face in the crowd, he willfully abets the oppression of Sueleen (and the equally petrified Winifred in the sidelines) whether he means to or not.
Michael Murphy’s slippery John Triplette is an interesting tricky case. Mostly just a pair of glistening teeth with a geek body attached to it, when John Triple becomes a disturbed observer to Sueleen’s strip-down, Altman and Murphy choose to bold the lines around this dotty, drab campaign manager. His reaction to Sueleen’s incredulous lack of self-consciousness is a typical mix of voyeuristic intrigue, disgust, pain, pleasure, and bemusement at the human condition. Murphy’s half-cocked eyebrow and gape-mouthed oafishness tells an entire story — the Altman actor's ultimate great achievement.
Lots of people in Nashville react in open-mouthed shock to things. Lily Tomlin, for instance, is always in this mode of delayed panic, as the perverse kid-folkster Tom (Keith Carradine) calls to try and hook up with Lily’s Linnea, the mother of two deaf children. She never seems able to get a word in edgewise with the men in her world, but manages to dominate them in bed with her maturity and her steel, un-bullshitting eyes. Linnea’s not one of the flighty girls Tom frequently manipulates with his seductive “I’m easy”’s and “It don’t worry me”’s. Linnea teaches how to say “I love you” in sign language to Tom; her inherently good-hearted, loving nature makes her the superior person, more confident, more assured in herself, better able to tell a losing game when it spits in her eye and accepting it wholeheartedly. But being a Lemonade Lucy could easily make Lily Tomlin boring—which is why screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury has her consent to the affair, reversing the boring Woody Allen tendency of having things happen to a woman on the whims of the man. Talking on the telephone, she sort of suspects it's just a fling; but if it will be a fling, it will be on her own terms, dammit. Molly Haskell observes the beautiful moment where Linnea manages to find her own panties, without Tom's help. For a brief moment, she humbles this narcissist — a guy who utterly hates himself.
Barbara Harris’s on-the-run wannabe (“I have a Gold Record!”) is a storm of busy forward movement, the physical embodiment of shaking and flaking, escaping her comically ineffectual husband (Bert Remsen with a magnificent ten-gallon hat), promising the audience a glimpse of her voice before being suppressed by the squeals of racecars. When she comes out at the end, it's a sight to behold. She's the new artist, the replacement, the new boss (same as the old boss), but we can sense the promise of star individuality and uniqueness that will endear us to her. But somehow, disturbingly, we get the sense that Barbara Harris's volcanic currents will be bear-trapped by her newfound stardom. Winifred is now Barbara Jean, which means it's only a matter of time before she meets her new Barnett. (We can't believe Remsen's Star will play, ineffectual and clumsy as he is.) Thus, she becomes the head-preacher for an America steadily on the verge of collapse, devastation, self-destruction, and self-inclosed idiocy. Riding the bomb. But there's hope in humanness, grassroots movements, sticking at the small ant-levels. Robert Altman does this, without ever losing grasp of the bigger picture. That's his real achievement.
*
We're all just Geraldine Chaplin, sticking mikes into stranger's faces, asking them to be real. Sometimes those strangers are our very intimates. I will never not love what Altman does here with structure: it's essentially a series of 2-to-3-minute sketches at a time. Mere glimpses, and then on to the next: turtle-facecream-Democrat, next; signing-leaving-calling, next; singing-booing-stripassault, next. It's scary how we can reduce to the sketch. And freeing. I like Van Gogh's sketches more than the finished thing.
*
I never get sick of this movie. Never, never, never. The dream film I wanna make is basically a response/tribute to this. This masterpiece has the sort of ambition that a lot of filmmakers today try desperately to reach, but the key is in its casual, rambling, just-woke-up quality. The filmmaker can be guilty of trying too hard, whereas for Altman and company, it just, y'know, sorta just came out lookin' like a mix of Children of Paradise, Rules of the Game and Seven Samurai. Altman makes it look so easy yet so intricately plotted that it has taken decades to unravel. One of my favorite gags — just noticed it this time — was when Karen Black's Connie White sings her first song, the audience doesn't clap; they only do when, in the far-far-right, you see a guy fold his hand in like 5 times to signal "Clap, dammit! You like this one."
I texted my friend Fernanda Amis this: "It's all about stardom, clearly. Haven Hamilton doesn't give a shit who Elliott Gould or Julie Christie are — he just knows they go to things like Oscars and Cannes Film Festivals, big things he wants to do without leaving the comforts of what he knows, Nashville. And that end, well: This country makes you feel shitty unless you’re able to do something extremely simply and concretely, like singing or bringing some kind of entertainment to a huge group of people, or being somebody that distracts people for a temporary amount of time. Again, Altman really wonderfully predicted our current age, where everybody on social media feels like they have to promote themselves, that they have to be their own celebrity in their own circle, that they have to matter. But these vain attempts to matter do not reflect the person. They can't, by principle. In the modern insanity, the star projection seems to matter more than the bundle of shatterable nerves that make up a "Barbara Jean". Many of the people in the movie obviously do exist as beautiful complicated people, but for the rest of the crowd that we see at the end, they don’t see that, and frankly they don't care; they only care about whoever can entertain them, and explain whatever chaos is unfolding, in the simplest way possible."
*
Merrily we go to hell. A cannibal eats itself and survives.
