Nashville’s most daring conceit is the brash manner in which it breaks the general rule that Hollywood movies focus on a small, easily manageable set of characters. Altman’s film follows the lives of no less than 24 major characters over a period of five days. In two hours and forty minutes, the film traces the narrative trajectories of all these characters, managing to make each one of them unique and interesting with only minimal screen time. The screenplay by Joan Tewkesbury is an incredible piece of work, intertwining all of these lives against the backdrop of Nashville, Tennessee, the country music capital of the world, during an especially heated presidential campaign in the year of America’s 200th birthday (overwrought patriotic imagery is everywhere).

The problem with Nashville at the time was that it was too revolutionary (which is probably why New Yorker critic Pauline Kael loved it so much and audiences didn’t). When United Artists head of production David Picker first read the screenplay, he rejected it with a note that said, “This is not a script.” UA refused to make the film, and Altman ended up making it on his own with ABC Pictures. And, according to Tewkesbury, after Picker saw the premiere, he sent Altman a telegram that said simply, “I was wrong.”

While Nashville is primarily about the show business world of country music, it has the kind of scope and ambition that allows it to turn the music scene into a microcosm of the United States in the mid-1970s. The twin political upheavals of Vietnam and Watergate are written all over the film, especially in the scenes that focus on a radical third-party presidential candidate named Hal Phillip Walker of the fictional Replacement Party. Walker, who is never seen physically, becomes a thematic force, as one of his campaign vans constantly lurks in the background, its loud speakers blaring his platform based on taxing churches, changing the national anthem, and removing all lawyers from government. It is only appropriate that the film climaxes at a Walker campaign rally in front of Nashville's Parthenon where unexpected violence breaks out, completely disrupting any sense of narrative momentum and leaving the fate of every major character dangling in unresolved limbo.

That Altman was able to get away with such a radical reworking of cinematic narrative is amazing. That it worked so well that other filmmakers of vastly different stripes have followed in his footsteps (think Steven Spielberg’s 1941 or P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia or Richard Curtis’s Love Actually) is testament to his strength of vision and skill behind the camera. As much as Nashville is a pastiche—a pasted together assortment of narrative shards that give a sense of life, but not of story—it is still more compelling than most traditional three-act narratives that feature closure and resolution. Like life itself, nothing is resolved in Nashville, nor should it be.

And, like life, Nashville is populated with a wide assortment of characters, all of who stick in your mind long after the film is over. From Geraldine Chaplin’s aggressive BBC documentary filmmaker, to Lily Tomlin’s unfulfilled gospel singer, to Keith Carradine’s womanizing folk-rocker, each character is fascinating and memorable. Some of the saddest and funniest scenes involve Gwen Welles as a struggling singer whose desire for fame and fortune blinds her to the obvious fact that she is utterly untalented. Ditto the sequences involving Ronee Blakley as a country diva whose health problems are forcing her professional life onto shaky ground; the sequence in which she begins to have a breakdown on stage by telling pointless stories when she should be singing is both hilarious and gut-wrenching.

Altman never quite equaled Nashville. He came close with Short Cuts (1993), a film that was similar in tone and structure, but it didn’t quite achieve the same astonishing balance of character, story, and sense of time and place. Perhaps there will always be something a bit magical about Nashville because it was so unique at the time and it has had such a lasting influence on how movies are made. Over the past nearly four decades years it has more than stood the test of time, and it will continue to be the bar by which other films like it are measured.

Copyright ©2013 James Kendrick

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