NASHVILLE
Directed by ROBERT ALTMAN Screenplay by JOAN TEWKESBURY
Nashville is the genuine article: a splendidly gifted film, vibrant and immediate, with moments of true greatness. Moments. If all goes well, the movie will survive the wild enthusiasm that has already been generated on its behalf.
The movie is a honky-tonk panorama of contemporary America and most of its obvious contradictions: a flagrant, nearly frenzied, workaday energy and a kind of moral deadness; a proud regard for history and heritage and an abiding need to construct a synthetic mythology; a sweeping national certitude and the hypocrisy that comes with it. Altman is fearless in his thematic ambitions for Nashville, and it is a good measure of his success that the movie is always fleet and supple, never top-heavy. The director and his talented collaborator Joan Tewkesbury (who also did the screenplay for Altman's excellent Thieves Like Us) find their major metaphor right at the heart of the country music scene and the people who create all those tunes about broken hearts and long lonesome roads. One suspects that what attracted Altman and Tewkesbury to C. & W. was both its audience ("These are the people who elect the President," a political advance man comments early in the film, with just a trace of disdain) and its tradition. Country-and-western basically dresses up folk music in rhinestones and spangles, making hay out of Americana. A lot of it is slick and sweet, and its sanctimony can curdle the blood. Altman used the music like a continuing, slap-happy dirge.
The movie satirizes country-and-western people—audience and performers alike—but without condescension and with a palpable affection for their fine, flaky spirit. Nashville stars two dozen actors, many of whom contributed their own songs, a touch that lends the film musical cohesion (and saves on expensive music rights). By themselves, most of the tunes—and most of the people who perform them—would not pass muster at the Grand Ole Opry. But the actors are skillful enough and their tunes either sprightly or funny enough to work around this point.
Defiant Apology. The one tune that occurs most frequently throughout the film and that indeed helps unify it is Keith Carradine's It Don't Worry Me with its chorus, "You may say that I ain't free/ But it don't worry me." Altman uses it as a lively anthem of indifference, a sing-along for deadheads. He weaves the song through the whole film and brings it full front at the climax, where a crowd sings it as a sort of chipper, even defiant apology after a singer has been shot down by a madman. "This isn't Dallas," shouts a performer from the stage. "It's Nashville." Of course, it is both. Altman means it to be even more. In this movie it is all of America.