a sad vortex into the american heart of evil
by
Douglas Messserli
Joan
Tewkesbury (script), Robert Altman (director) Nashville / 1975
Maybe
it’s just because as I get older epic-like complex plots seem basically
uninteresting to me; but I think even the director of Nashville, Robert Altman didn’t quite know what the plot of his
film was. With a cast of hundreds, its twists and turns in story don’t truly
matter; what does matter are the various ways in which his characters seek
either love (save for a few, nearly everyone in this work jumps in and out of
numerous beds) or success (in music or politics). Very few of these silly folks
from the city of Nashville find either, or if they have performed at the famed Grand
Ole Opry, don’t appear to be very happy about what they have attained.
Indeed, singer Haven Hamilton (Henry
Gibson) would rather be in politics, while the popular singer Barbara Jean
(Ronee
Blakley) has just suffered a burn accident—apparently related to what her
husband Barnett
(Allen Garfield) later describes as “nervous breakdown.” The trio of Bill
(Allan F.
Nicholls), Mary (Cristina Raines), and Tom (Keith Carradine) (a satirical take
on Peter, Paul, and Mary) are so confused in their love for one another that it
might be better if they all fell into bed into a good-fashioned threesome.
White gospel singer who performs with all
black choruses (another of Altman’s hilarious satirical jabs) Linnea Reese (a
wonderful Lily Tomlin) would clearly rather be at home with her two deaf
children (as if one were not enough)
giving them her love, but since her husband Delbert (Ned 
Beatty) is busy
running Hal Philip Walker’s campaign in Tennessee and is lawyer for Hamilton,
she finds herself instead in bed with Tom, who, the moment she rises from
love-making, is on the phone to find another woman for the night. Singer Lady
Pearl (Barbara Baxley), dedicated to the dead Kennedys, is mostly drunk
throughout.
Naïve Sueleen Gay (Gwen Welles), like a country
version of Florence Foster Jenkins, hasn’t a clue that she can’t sing, and is
forced to strip so that she might get the opportunity to perform with Haven
Hamilton and Barbara Jean at a political fund-raiser at Nashville’s The
Parthenon, which her airport cook friend, Wade Cooley (Robert DoQui) warns her
against with his honest assessment that
she can’t carry a tune. Celebrity
seeking teenager Martha, now LA Joan (Shelley Duvall) just wants to get close
to any of these famous folks and probably into their beds as well, although she
is supposed to be seeing her dying aunt. And only God knows what BBC
correspondent Opal (Geraldine Chaplin) is doing in this film, randomly interviewing
some of the figures and wandering in and out of junk yards and school bus-lots.
Nor do we have a clue why low-three-wheel
bike rider (Jeff Goldblum) is tooling around town, or why the nice-looking,
mother-loving Viet Nam veteran, Pfc. Glenn Kelly (Scott Glenn) has come to Nashville,
supposedly in admiration of his dead mother’s appreciation of Barbara Jean. Or
why Elliott Gould, Julie Christie, and Howard K. Smith show up to play
themselves. While we see all these figures and numerous others, we never even
get a glimpse of the would-be president, running on the Replacement Party
ticket—in an eerie prescience of the Tea Party and its later manifestations. 
But perhaps we have since spotted him and the disasters he threated (although
Altman and writer Joan Tewkesbury’s candidate seems far more liberally or, at
least, Libertarian- oriented than our current “outsider” President).
If anything, this Altman masterwork
shows us just how crazy we USA citizens are as a people for whom desire plays
the major roles in our lives. And the film, in the end, in its vast expression
of those facts cooks up, finally, to be a kind insanely messy stew. But also
there is a kind a sanity, which appears in several scenes throughout the film
through its gentle and reassuring music, much of it by cast-members themselves—Keith
Carradine’s “I’m Easy” and “Honey; Ronee Blakley’s “Bluebird,” “Tapedeck in His
Tractor (The Cowboy Song),” “My Idaho Home,” “Down to the River,” “One I Love
You,” and “Dues”; Henry Gibson’s (with Richard
Baskin) “Keep A-Goin'” and “200 Years”: Karen Black’s (yes, she too stars in
this movie) “Memphis” “I Don’t Know If I Found It in You,” and “Rolling Stone”;
and Lily Tomlin’s lyrics for Richard Baskin’s music to “Yes, I Do.” Apparently,
Altman required all of his major actors to compose as well as sing. Has there
ever been a musical motion picture that has asked so much of its actors? Or,
perhaps, looked at differently, that has given them so much opportunity for
expression?
We know that when you have opened the
pulsing heart of USA values, it will inevitably end in some kind of violence.
Here, music itself turns against its performers, as loner Kenny Frasier (David
Hayward) opens his violin case to take out a gun and shoot down Haven Hamilton
and Barbara Jean. We can’t even quite imagine his motive in the shooting, just
as it is so difficult to imagine hundreds of shootings throughout the USA each
year.
But, finally, Altman pulls off a miracle by
transforming the tragic-stricken audience as miraculously being given the
opportunity, as Hamilton passes off the microphone to the shy, wannabe musician
Winifred who has changed her name to Albuquerque (the always amazing Barbara
Harris), who slowly settles in, Streisand style, to Keith Carradine’s “It Don’t
Worry Me.” The song might almost be seen as a statement of so many poor
American’s slavery to the system; but she slowly transforms some of the saddest
lyrics of US existence, “Tax relief may never come,” “The economy may be
depressed,” “You may say that I ain’t free,” etc, each stanza followed by “It
don’t worry me.” “Life may be a one-way
street,” “But it don’t worry me.” Somehow Harris turns this kind of “Trumpland”
song into a kind of anthem of survival, a choral statement that whips up the
shocked audience into a kind of delusional sense of possibilities simply by
tuning out of the problems of their life
In retrospect, Altman’s satiric ending
and Carradine’s nihilistic lyrics become almost a mirror to the pit of American
horror, while at the same time restating the resilience of the American poor and
middle class. It’s a painful if slightly ending to this bitter presentation of the
greed and the endless chase of its characters for something that will never make
them happy. Sex, success, celebrity and the implied money that goes along with
this has not satisfied a single figure in what is not really a comedy, but a
sad vortex into the American heart of evil.
Los Angeles,
September 20, 2018
Great film in Altman's anarchic best.
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