Nashville (1975)

4 Stars (out of 4)

Mis-America

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

I've seen Robert Altman's Nashville four times, over four long spans, and I've had an almost totally different reaction each time. As a teen, I didn't like it. I found the music grating. Later, I saw the satirical value of the music. The third time I saw it as a great film, and the fourth time — just recently, on the Criterion Channel — a masterpiece. The film is fifty years old as I write, and even though it seems like a snapshot of a specific time and place, it's really a snapshot of all of us here in America, and at any time. This time, this Trumpian dystopia, especially speaks to the movie, and vice-versa.

The film is set over a few days, in (of course) Nashville, leading up to a fundraising gala for the Replacement Party presidential candidate Hal Philip Walker, who is never seen. Throughout the film, a truck mounted with loudspeakers rolls methodically around town blaring Walker's talking points, and, truthfully, here in 2025, they all sound pretty good. But in conservative Tennessee, perhaps they do not. We are introduced to diminutive, egomaniacal country star Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), who is in the middle of recording an insufferably patriotic song for the upcoming Bicentennial. This sets the tone.

In a nearby studio, white singer Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin) records with a Black gospel choir. Gabby, dingy English journalist Opal (Geraldine Chaplin) somehow sneaks into the building and tries to interview everyone. Then we meet perhaps the biggest star of the movie's world, Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), who puts on a happy face but seems to be just at the end of her emotional rope. There are twenty-four characters here, and I can't and won't go on introducing all of them, but there are a few more that are essential, including Tom Frank (Keith Carradine).

Tom is a member of a folk trio called, cleverly, Bill, Mary and Tom. Bill and Mary are a hopelessly traditional married couple, and Tom — with a James Dean sense of cool about him — wants to go solo. He romances several of the women in the cast and sings the movie's most memorable song, "I'm Easy." It's an astonishing scene, as the camera roams around the small club, landing on several women who seem swept away, perhaps convinced that Tom is singing the song just for them. Just for fun I'll mention Shelley Duvall as the oddly-dressed, flighty "L.A. Joan" and a young, gangly Jeff Goldblum who spends the movie riding around on a ridiculous chopper that looks like a praying mantis.

Altman and screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury create a series of scenes that seem to pick up after they have already started and end before they have finished, as if the characters were carrying on without us. It should have caused a choppy, disorienting effect, but instead it creates a cohesive fabric and a unique, fluid rhythm. Scenes are deceptive. Whatever seems to be happening in them, it's the subtext that actually matters. Consider Barbara Baxley as one of the lesser characters, who spends the movie ruminating on John F. Kennedy in a mournful way. Simply bringing up JFK in this way is a small political act in the middle of a bigger film.

Everything culminates in a shocking act of violence that, sadly, also seems brutally relevant today. And that act turns everything that we've seen sideways, as if everything we knew to be true were going to be different from now on. Despite the struggles I've had with this film, critics of the day greeted it breathlessly, including Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert — both of whom selected it as the year's best film — and Pauline Kael, whose review began: "Is there such a thing as an orgy for movie lovers — but an orgy without excess? At Robert Altman's new, almost-three-hour film, Nashville, you don't get drunk on images, you're not overpowered — you get elated. I've never before seen a movie I loved in quite this way: I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness."

It set a record for the most Golden Globe nominations to date, eleven, and received five Oscar nominations (in a year that was rife with riches). It was up for Best Picture, competing against the likes of Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (it's a bit of a sore spot for me that Cuckoo's Nest, the least of the five, was the winner). Altman was nominated along with Federico Fellini (Amarcord), Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet, and Milos Forman (who won). Ronee Blakley and Lily Tomlin were both nominated for Best Supporting Actress — imagine choosing just two from the twenty-four? — and lost to Lee Grant in Shampoo. And the only Oscar it won was for "I'm Easy," a wistful tune that might have dissipated into the wind and drifted across time.