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Altman may have reached a little too far in this; but right now, in a time of congenial but often unambitious entertainments, it is good to have film makers who take that kind of risk. The intertwining narrative threads all have to do with music: people who make it or want to, people who listen to it and are moved by it, people whose lives are both distorted and enriched by it. There is no firm plot, only a lot of related incidents that enlarge and amplify each other. Relationships end and begin again, change deeply and remain the same. Whether it is a love affair, a business relationship or a fleeting allegiance, all the film's separate episodes seem to share a common theme of hollowness.
This can most clearly be seen in another recurring motif: the unlikely presidential campaign of Hal Phillip Walker. His platform expresses the shiniest, most insubstantial dreams of the country, and it capitalizes on the same sort of cozy, synthetic populism as country music. Walker wants to abolish oil subsidies and the electoral college, and even run all lawyers out of Government, "especially Congress." His appeal, like the music, is mostly emotional and a little treacherous. On a TV interview, Howard K. Smith informs us that Walker is "something of a mystery man" and first attracted college students to his cause with McKuenesque inquiries like "Does Christmas smell like oranges to you?" In Altman's tilted but pertinent fantasy, it makes perfect sense for Smith to add as an afterthought that indeed for him Christmas always has.
Real Assassins. Altman is at considerable pains not to take himself as seriously as perhaps he should. To this end, he installs a kind of international groupie, a BBC correspondent named Opal (energetically played by Geraldine Chaplin), at the very center of the action, and he has her mouth a great gush of pieties and platitudes about the U.S.: "It's America!" she says, beholding a collision on a highway; gun owners are "the real assassins," presumably because their influence can focus the madness of others toward homicide; a yard filled with auto wrecks is symbolic of the violent rape and waste of the whole country. Still, Altman is advancing these images seriously while Opal is commenting on them, and it is this kind of coyness—the eagerness both to use the rather parched symbolism and mock it too—that is the movie's most serious flaw.
The cast is large and almost uniformly excellent. One notices and most particularly appreciates Ronee Blakley and Karen Black as two of country music's leading attractions; Henry Gibson, wily and hilarious as Nashville's unofficial mayor, a purveyor of syrupy patriotism and fawning good will; Barbara Harris, splendid as a whacked-out kewpie who wants to be a big star; Dave Peel as Gibson's rather cowed son, looking like a crestfallen Arthur Godfrey; Michael Murphy as Walker's advance man; and David Hayward as the timid assassin.