Short Cuts

SHORT CUTS            A-              
USA  (187 mi)  1993  ‘Scope  d:  Robert Altman

I never start with an idea.  I always see something. I start with an image, a cigarette being put out in a jar of mustard, for instance, or the remains, the wreckage of a dinner left on the table.  Pop cans in the fireplace, that sort of thing.  And a feeling goes with that.  And that feeling seems to transport me back to that particular time and place, and the ambiance of the time.  But it is the image, and the emotion that goes with that image — that’s what’s important. 

—Raymond Carver, from John Alton, Conversations with Raymond Carver, 1990

I had a lousy night, couldn’t sing for shit.  It was a lousy crowd.  I just hate LA.  All they do is snort coke and talk.  

—Tess Trainer (Annie Ross)

While Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) and certainly Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN (1974) are considered definitive movies about Los Angeles, add this one to the mix, set in the suburban sprawl of contemporary life, a film that offers a frightening view of a soulless town that has lost any trace of its once thriving humanity.  The motif of the film is built around the growing chaos of intermingled lives trapped in the petty comedies and tragedies of the Los Angeles lifestyle, with characters appearing unexpectedly within one another’s stories, as once again, in the manner of choreographing 24 main characters in Nashville (1975) and 48 in A Wedding (1978), this time Altman places 22 characters on an epic journey with many different interwoven stories, inspired by 9 Raymond Carver short stories (and a poem), where common themes death and infidelity, also the difficulties in sustaining relationships intersect.  Removed from the Pacific Northwest of Carver’s stories, Altman outraged Carver cultists much as he had done earlier with Raymond Chandler enthusiasts in The Long Goodbye (1973), even having the audacity to add a new story of his own.  Much of the emotional feel in all these films is broken characters that once broken, are never able to reassemble their broken parts quite like they were before, where in essence they’re never fully healed, where a part of their lives remain shattered by traumatic circumstances.  A town of all surfaces and no depth, a heavy price to pay is an absence of love, where Los Angeles resembles a ghost town of moving spirits incapable of love, where it would take an apocalyptic act of God to shake people out of their instilled complacency.   Southern California never looked so dysfunctional, where modernism is associated with bleakness and desolation, yet this plays out as a satiric black comedy, where the characters are clueless how they each contribute to the overall pollution of such toxically self-absorbed lives that they simply don’t have the capacity to love anymore.  One of his most ambitious projects since Nashville, the film was shot in ten weeks, with each storyline filmed in weekly divisions, Altman’s examination of contemporary life in Los Angeles shows people struggling to connect with each other through phone sex or illicit sexual liaisons, suggesting this all leads to avoidance, where people are incapable of speaking openly and honestly with one another.  Something of a reaction to an 80’s culture that featured special effects blockbusters and mindless television entertainment, shown in neverending scenes with insipid television shows watched by otherwise bored and unattended children, Altman’s view of the modern era suggests an absence of responsibility leads to an infestation of violence that is pervasive in American life, particularly against women, where men continue to display a passive insensitivity that is never punished, but only results in more apathy.   

The film has one of Altman’s strongest and most memorable opening sequences, a neon pink, candy-colored, opening credit sequence with pink helicopters flying in the black of night sweeping over Los Angeles to spray for the medfly infestation, which plays out like a foreign invasion that must be eradicated.  Bruce Davison and Andie MacDowell play Howard and Ann Finnegan, a news commentator and his wife who are concerned about the toxic quality of the chemicals, from A Small, Good Thing, yet they allow their 8-year old son Casey (Zane Cassidy) to walk to school alone in what becomes the central thread of the film.  In a beautifully conceived single shot by cinematographer Walt Lloyd, Casey is seen running down the sidewalks before he swings out into the street where he is hit by a car driven by a waitress, Doreen Piggott (Lily Tomlin), who is upset by the excessive drinking of her husband Earl (Tom Waits).  When Casey is able to get up (played by the son of a stunt double), he seems more embarrassed than hurt, refusing her attempts to drive him home, as he was taught not to get into cars with strangers, so instead he walks home, head down in shame, as he dreads having to tell his parents he forget to look before entering the street.  By the time his mother gets home later, as she’s ordered him a special birthday cake at a bakery for the next day, Casey is asleep on the couch.  Rushed off to the hospital, he lapses into a coma where he lingers in extensive care throughout most of the film.  Doreen is completely unaware of the complications, as she drove away believing he was fine, failing to get his name or phone number, and while the accident certainly frightened her, she quickly forgets about him.  Lori Singer is Zoe, an overly sensitive classical cello player whose mother is a widowed jazz vocalist, Annie Ross as Tess, the singer of weird, offbeat songs that are quiet, highly personal and introspective, providing emotional cues throughout the film, where she’s one of the few with her pulse on honesty and authenticity, where the irony is she’s can’t reach or communicate with her own daughter in real life, who’s distant and removed, and misses her opportunity to connect when it matters the most.  These jazz interludes help disseminate the narrative mood and lend credibility to a stark emotional realism, as they reflect moments in life when things haven’t always gone right, where in keeping with Altman movie songs that become anthems for the modern times we live in, she sings “I Don’t Know You” SHORT CUTS annie ross i don't know you - YouTube (47 seconds).

Chris Penn is Jerry, the Finnegan’s pool man, who grows increasingly frustrated throughout the film from the occupation of his wife Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a stay-at-home phone sex operator who adlibs raunchy phone sex talk to paying customers while she’s changing a baby’s diaper, bringing to the forefront a working woman’s everyday predicament, while making fun of the pornography and the sex industry.  While this was not in the Carver story (neither is the jazz vocalist), it is in the spirit of his stories, much like Altman’s version of Raymond Chandler in The Long Goodbye (1973), using Altman’s imagination and his trust in actors to write their own scenes, where the conversations are supposedly verbatim from calls Leigh heard in phone sex parlors while researching the part.  Jerry and Lois are best friends with a financially strapped couple, Bill and Honey Bush (Robert Downey Jr. and Lili Taylor), where Bill does makeup for actors in the movie industry, but they’re also housesitting for their more affluent black neighbors next door, almost always seen in a shot through the purplish prism of a fish tank.  Two other sets of couples are introduced at a concert performed by Zoe, Claire and Stuart Kane (Anne Archer and Fred Ward), where she plays a professional clown, while he remains unemployed, and Dr. Ralph and Marian Wyman (Matthew Modine and Julianne Moore), a young doctor at the hospital (who is taking care of Casey), while his wife is a painter of often grotesque, larger-than-life laughing or screaming figures, where they can be heard talking throughout the performance, gossiping about the presence of Jeopardy’s Alex Trebek in the audience, while also arranging a dinner party together.  And finally two other couples are connected by the bed-jumping habits of the husband, Gene Shepard (Tim Robbins), an LA motorcycle cop that’s not against stopping women just for their phone number, and his wife Sherri (Madeleine Stowe), who suspects her husband is into foul play, as in one scene she literally smells it on his hands, where his latest tryst involves sleeping with Betty Weathers (Frances McDormand), currently separated from her husband Stormy Weathers (Peter Gallagher), one of the nighttime helicopter pilots dropping all the chemicals, a man who refuses to accept the separation, even as Betty can be seen teaching their young son how to repeat the words, “He is a son-of-a-bitch.”  While Robbins takes liberties with his philandering character, seen preening before the mirror in his uniform before heading off to work, he also masters the art of deception by inventing classic lines about the classified nature of his work which prevents him from being able to speak about where he spends all his time away from home.      

While worried about Casey’s medical status, Howard’s long lost father that hasn’t been seen in 30 years suddenly shows up at the hospital, Paul (Jack Lemmon), who uses this opportunity to try to ingratiate himself back into the family, talking to nearly everyone involved on the case, always with a cheerful smile or positive outlook on the day, though one of the scenes of the film is Paul describing to his son that precise moment when his own marriage died, a bewildering descriptive story that couldn’t make his son more uncomfortable, especially considering what he’s going through with his own son, where the results afterwards are positively devastating when the young boy dies, where adding to the heartbreak, Paul can be seen leaving the hospital corridors alone, knowing his attempts at reparations are lost, while the rest of his life will be spent in eternal remorse and anguish.  Making matters worse, when the parents fail to pick up the birthday cake they ordered, both parents are harassed by incessantly insulting phone calls by the baker (Lyle Lovett).  Paralleling this harrowing storyline is the deteriorating relationship between the Kanes where Stuart goes on a three-day fishing trip with two of his buddies, a Carver story, So Much Water, So Close to Home, that was adapted before in Ray Lawrence’s superbly crafted JINDABYNE (2006), where they wander off into isolated territory that takes a grueling hike just to get there, but as they set up tents, one of them discovers the dead body of a naked young girl submerged in the water.  Believing it’s better not to move the body, they continue fishing for the next couple days before finally reporting the incident to the police when they return back home.  The implications of their actions do not reveal themselves until after Stuart returns home and makes love to his wife, telling her about the dead body afterwards, where Claire is horrified and simply can’t handle the blasé notion of leaving a naked woman’s body in the water for days without calling anyone for help, continuing to fish as if nothing had happened, where she actually can’t stand that part of her husband for doing that.  As if to add emphasis, and a recognition of a completely separate female consciousness, the camera zooms in on Claire’s face, expressing her shock and internalized state of anguish in one of the longest shots of the film.  At the same time, Zoe tries to tell her mother about what happened to Casey, the kid next door, and her response, while rehearsing with the band, is offhandedly curt and casual, stepping right back into the song “I Don’t Know You,” where it’s clear her own life has seen so much trouble this hardly even registers, where you just can’t always give a damn.  But for Zoe, it’s a dark and paralyzing moment, becoming even more calamitous when she goes home and commits suicide. 

Meanwhile, after a knock-down-drag-out marital fight between the Wymans about something that happened years ago, one where Marian literally exposes herself in more ways than one, confessing an infidelity to her seethingly angry husband while naked from the waist down, there’s some question whether the truth really changes anything between them, as the division has only widened through the years.  Here resolution remains at a distance as characters vent their frustrations in a moment of hysteria, a kind of primal scream (like her paintings), where a heightened state of melodrama permits them to avoid true emotional connection by making the emotions themselves the object of attention.  The dinner party that both couples were dreading ahead of time turns into this drunken, Fellini-esque spectacle that lasts well into the next day, where neither couple wants to go home, as they once again dread being alone with their partner, where they were having wildly divisive separation issues beforehand.  Altman’s narrative control, as it has done throughout his career, keeps the audience at a similar distance, where the viewer becomes a discriminating observer of these randomly occurring events.  The movie ends with an earthquake, a cataclysm of nature, where the film doesn’t really resolve anything, as life goes on afterwards, much as it did before, with Annie Ross singing over the closing credits, while a camera hovers over a map of Los Angeles, “I’m a Prisoner of Life” Annie Ross and the Low Note Quintet - Prisoner of Life / I'm Gonna Go Fishin' [from Short Cuts] (4:20).  What’s particularly noticeable about Altman’s film is how ordinary the characters are, where they are all meant to be the people next door, where the most ordinary mundane things become the important thread that holds them together, actually becoming the defining tissue in their lives, where economic circumstances play into this, as people behave differently in different economic strata.  Working class people live claustrophobic lives on top of one another, where there is no space, as they rarely get a day off or have a vacation, like a fishing trip that might only happen once a year, while the wealthy couple lives with the entire panorama of Los Angeles visible through the smog out their backyard, where there is an infinite amount of space that literally consumes this couple who are suffocating in a relationship defined by emotional distance.  Coming after the critical and financial success of The Player (1992), a scathing satire on the Hollywood movie itself, this allowed Altman a chance at the kind of film he wanted to make, returning to the level of power directors had in the 70’s, after the fall of the studios, where Altman acknowledges for that string of 8 pictures from MASH (1970) to Nashville (1975), he made exactly the movies he wanted to make with no outside interference.  While the 80’s were spent filming plays by prominent dramatists, these films were intelligent adaptations of literary works, as Altman has once again stamped his own unique vision from contemporary literature, resurrecting his career by masterfully creating order out of chaos, where SHORT CUTS is a brilliantly executed return to form. 

Raymond Carver died all too early, at age 50, of lung cancer in 1988, where the appeal of Carver's stories lies in their raw, spare truthfulness, creating a series of random occurrences not necessarily leading anywhere or culminating in a single event, where there is no ultimate resolution or acts of redemption, as both Altman and Carver have a dark view of the world where the banal becomes horrible and inexplicable.  Not really providing a beginning or end, but just the middle of the stories, this film evokes a ferocity of spirit by creating a symphonic accumulation of small things, where these eventually are the things that matter, small details of life that seem so absurd at times, but they make up bigger parts, where characters have a tragicomic response to it all.  A film that is all about behavior, that can be viewed as a series of betrayals, with people refusing to acknowledge one another as individuals, seen instead as objects that can be abused, often fed by illusions, alcoholism, or self-doubt, leading to a false sense of security, where underneath these isolated characters is an erosion of trust, where relationships are deteriorating from self-interest and personal greed.  According to Altman, “This is more complicated than either Nashville or A Wedding, even though it has less characters than A Wedding because A Wedding was all concerned about the same event, where everyone was really related to someone else.  In this film they don’t necessarily relate to one another.”  The cellist and jazz singer are both Altman inventions, musicians that can only truly express themselves through their artistry, as it’s an extension of who they are, where they personify the artist pouring their heart out through another medium, representing both Carver and Altman.  The Finnegans are the kind of people where bad things don’t happen to them, as they have a good job, a big home, an overprotected child, where they built a kind of life structured around not allowing anything to go wrong, and then their kid gets hit by a car, where they’re looking for answers, bewildered and confused, asking what did they do wrong?  And, of course, there isn’t anything they did wrong, it just happened, leading them to a place where there are no answers.  Jack Lemmon’s personal confession is a 9-minute monologue, where Altman had to figure out a way to make it interesting, to hold the audience, so the camera just holds a close up on his face and lets Jack work the magic, where the real interest is the soul of the character.  You could dress it up and try to make it more visually interesting, but truth can stand on its own and is stronger when stripped down to its bare essentials, beautifully expressed by Annie Ross’s unvarnished pain and anger in “To Hell with Love” annie ross-to hell with love - YouTube (7:10). 

And finally, it has been pointed out by others, namely Robert Kolker in A Cinema of Loneliness, that the characters in SHORT CUTS suggest an influence beyond Raymond Carver, where they seem frozen in time, ingrained with a spirit of human despair, forced to look into the mirror at their own self-inflicted pain, stuck in a kind of prison, much like the visual influence of painter Edward Hopper, where his paintings, most especially Night Hawks (6,000 × 3,274 pixels), portraying people sitting in a downtown diner at night, and one of the most recognizable paintings in American art, have been copied by countless filmmakers, but perhaps no one “but Altman, perhaps unconsciously, has captured, without imitation, the loss and diminishment of personality that so many of Hopper’s paintings connote:  lives negated by depression and loneliness.”  According to the writings of Mark Strand in his book Hopper, 1994:

Within the question of how much the scenes in Hopper are influenced by an imprisoning, or at least a limiting, dark is the issue of our temporal arrangements—what do we do with time and what does time do to us?...Hopper’s people…are like characters whose parts have deserted them and now, trapped in the space of their waiting, must keep themselves company, with no clear place to go, no future.  

[Hopper’s paintings] are short, isolated moments of figuration that suggest the tone of what will follow just as they carry forward the tone of what preceded them.  The tone but not the content.  The implication but not the evidence.  They are saturated with suggestion.  The more theatrical or staged they are, the more they urge us to wonder what will happen next; the more lifelike, the more they urge us to construct a narrative of what came before.  They engage us when the idea of passage cannot be far from our minds…Our time with the painting must include—if we are self-aware—what the painting reveals about the nature of continuousness.  Hopper’s paintings are not vacancies in a rich ongoingness.  They are all that can be gleaned from a vacancy that is shaded not so much by the events of life lived as by the time before life and time after.  The shadow of dark hangs over them, making whatever narratives we construct around them seem sentimental and beside the point. 

Nashville

NASHVILLE               A                    

USA  (159 mi)  1975  ‘Scope  d:  Robert Altman

The price of bread may worry some, but it don’t worry me

Tax relief may never come, but it don’t worry me

Economy’s depressed not me,

My spirit’s high as it can be

And you may say that I ain’t free, but it don’t worry me

It don’t worry me, it don’t worry me,

You may say that I ain’t free, but it don’t worry me

They say this train don’t give out rides, well it don’t worry me

All the world is taking sides, but it don’t worry me

In my empire life is sweet, just ask any bum  you meet

And life may be a one way street, but it don’t worry me

It don’t worry me,  it don’t worry me,

You may say that I ain’t free, but it don’t worry me

It don’t worry me, it don’t worry me,

You may say that I ain’t free, but it don’t worry me. 

It don’t worry me,  it don’t worry me,

You may say that I ain’t free, but it don’t worry me

Barbara Harris - It Don't Worry Me - YouTube (Finale, 5:02), written by Keith Carradine, Nashville OST It Don't Worry Me-Keith Carradine - YouTube (2:47)

One thing Altman railed against throughout his lifetime was phonies, probably because in Hollywood he had to deal with so many of them, where this theme resurfaces in any number of variations in his movies where a character is not who or what they appear to be, such as McCabe in  McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), or they’re cynically exploiting their false mythology, such as Buffalo Bill, who sees himself as a bogus entertainer willing to exploit his famous name for fame and fortune in BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS, OR SITTING BULL’S HISTORY LESSON (1976).  But in this film, Altman takes aim at celebrity worship, where you’re not anybody unless you’re somebody, where the general consensus seems to be, why should we listen to anyone unless they’re famous?  Of course, the problem being, famous people often find it hard to tell the difference between their own legend and who they really are, like Ronee Blakely as a down home Loretta Lynn style country singer Barbara Jean, caught up in her own myth, perpetuated by her self-interested, overcontrolling husband and manager Barnett (Allen Garfield) who literally pulls the strings like a puppeteer, where she can’t tell the difference between what’s real, and what’s not.  The cynical message being broadcast throughout the entire film is an unseen political candidate running for office on the Replacement Party, where a car drives around town using a bullhorn to announce his platform is little more than - - not those guys - - railing against the status quo at every turn while never really revealing what he’s running for, except an early 17th century concept, sort of Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part Two platform, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” claiming that’s why government doesn’t work.  Oh, and he wants to change the national anthem.  This film is one of the great ensemble masterpieces, where it has 24 main characters, an hour of musical numbers, and multiple storylines interwoven into a fractured narrative about life in Music City, the country music capitol of America, where the underbelly is just as exposed as a coterie of stars.        

NASHVILLE came at an interesting time in history, following two major scandals, having only recently pulled out of Vietnam, and Watergate was exposing the imperial secrets of the Presidency, where Nixon had just resigned (in fact, the scenes in the Grand Ole Opry were shot on the day Nixon resigned), and furthermore, hardly anyone had heard of an oddly ambitious Southern governor named Jimmy Carter.  Somehow Altman tapped into a very serious and traumatizing time in America with a show-stopping piece of Americana that is a blisteringly hilarious satire, where often you can't tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t, including the performers, as it’s all an illusion.  In effect Altman has created a disaster film about the American Dream that may draw upon Hitchcock’s themes of fear and complacency in The Birds (1963), where despite the plethora of musical numbers, safe, family oriented, and unthreatening by all accounts, the American public is hiding behind a security net of fantasy escapism, where like Hitchcock, both use surprising, somewhat apocalyptic acts of nature to strike back at foolish humans who continue to believe they are exempt from life’s tragedies.  Central to this theme is the use of the song “It Don’t Worry Me,” which brings the final curtain down at the end, which is essentially a song of openly acknowledged ignorance, “The price of bread may worry some/It don’t worry me” or “Economy’s depressed, not me,” coming from a Southern town that doesn’t wish to have anything to do with the rest of the country’s problems, a blissfull ignorance that actually reflects the same state of mind as Mrs. Bundy (Ethel Griffies) in Hitchcock’s film, the local expert ornithologist who swears birds would never attack humans and that people have nothing to worry about.  It’s an interesting parallel that suggests both directors working at the top of their game tapped into similar themes a decade apart, where The Birds release preceded President Kennedy’s assassination by 6 or 7 months, with his brother Robert, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X all assassinated before the decade of the 60’s was over, while Altman’s release of this film preceded the election of President Jimmy Carter just a little over a year later, initially dismissed as a regional candidate, followed by the energy crisis, record levels of rising inflation, and the Iranian hostage crisis, America’s first taste of international terrorism.  In both instances, these prescient films were followed by a lingering social malaise of untold proportions.    

A Nashvillian looks at Nashville / The Dissolve, Noel Murray, former Nashville resident and current film and culture critic, from The Dissolve:

The movie Nashville isn’t trying to be docu-realistic when it comes to Nashville itself. This is something a lot of actual Nashville residents—in the music industry especially—didn’t get back in 1975. (My friend Jim Ridley examined the whole local kerfuffle over Nashville in this well-researched 1995 Scene article.) It’s something a lot of big-city music and film critics didn’t get at the time, either. Nashville follows an eclectic, loosely related mob of superstars, wannabes, fans, and hangers-on over the course of five days, watching how country-music royalty like Haven Hamilton (played by Henry Gibson) and cred-seeking young folk-rockers like Tom Frank (Keith Carradine) enjoy and exploit the privileges of fame. The film builds to a galvanizing act of violence, which leads to a surprisingly noble reaction from Haven, and a unifying performance of one of Tom’s songs. Prior to that, though, Nashville roams freely through a Southern mini-metropolis that’s much sillier than the real one.

As a result, the movie’s version of country music, while tuneful, is intentionally cartoonish. Which means that as part of coastal critics’ apparently eternal need to protect defenseless middle-Americans from mean-spirited showbiz types like Alexander Payne, the Coen brothers, and Robert Altman, some tastemakers grumbled about Nashville, claiming Altman was making fun of hicks and disrespecting a grand tradition of American folk music. Reviewing the soundtrack, The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau complained that the actors weren’t even authentic country singers, writing, “If the music makes the movie, as more than one film critic has surmised, then the movie is a lie. Another possibility: the critics are fibbing a little to cover their ignorance.”

That particular take on Nashville is based on the misperception that Robert Altman set out to make a movie about country music. That was more the goal of producer Jerry Weintraub, who saw in this project a hit soundtrack album waiting to happen. Altman, on the other hand, saw an opportunity to make a grand statement about celebrity, politics, the deep-rooted conservatism of the South, and a nation on the cusp of its bicentennial. Knowing nothing about Nashville, he sent screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury on a couple of scouting trips, which she came back from loaded down with anecdotes about a medium-sized city with a small-town vibe, where she kept running into the same people whether she was visiting a recording studio, a racetrack, a church, or a bar.

Because Altman liked to improvise, with input from his cast (who in Nashville also wrote some of their own songs), Tewkesbury often doesn’t get enough credit for her contributions to Nashville. But she was the one who helped devise a structure with two dozen major characters wandering into and out of each other’s storylines—even if it’s just to stand mute in the back of a shot, barely noticeable. And it was Tewkesbury who established the recurring moral dilemma these characters face, which she pinpoints on the Criterion Blu-ray when she talks about the scene in Nashville where a terrible singer (played by Gwen Welles) gets duped into performing a striptease at a political fundraiser. “I can fix this so I won’t have to take off all my clothes,” says Tewkesbury, describing what every character in Nashville thinks as they make compromises with their careers, ideals, and personal relationships.

Make no mistake, though: Nashville is Altman’s movie more than anyone’s. He had a capable team helping him achieve a revolutionary sound mix—with every character miked-up and woven into the soundtrack—and helping him cut hours of material into a fluidly paced film that sometimes ping-pongs rapidly between scenes, and sometimes stays still to take in a musical performance. But it’s always Altman pulling the strings, constructing a world so teeming that it seems to spill off the edges of the screen. (One of the movie’s best tricks is playing key songs like “It Don’t Worry Me” in the background well before they’re performed in the film, so they already seem like massive hits that everyone knows.) Though Altman and Tewkesbury based some of the major Nashville players on Loretta Lynn, Roy Acuff, Charley Pride, and others, they weren’t intending to satirize or celebrate country music. The songs—sometimes funny, sometimes sweet—express the characters’ feelings, and their view of the world, irrespective of the location.

Altman’s film acknowledges a period of diminished faith in government while tapping into the populist fervor of country music, actually equating the two, comparing the hypocrisy of politics with the sleaze and dishonesty of the entertainment business.  Yet somehow, when looking back over Altman’s career, while no two films are alike, they all convey similar themes, ideas, story, or style, and point back at one another, as if part of a continuing conversation.  Altman enlarges the world of expanding characters depicted in California Split (1974), adding many more characters, each with their own individual narrative.  Much more than his earlier films, Altman strove for something larger, where the film would become a grand cultural statement, encompassing many attitudes and points of view, or in Altman’s words, “a metaphor for America,” while screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury adds her view, “All you need to do is add yourself as the twenty-fifth character and know that whatever you think about the film is right, even if you think the film is wrong.”  In this way, simply by the expanding and open ended film process, yet clearly set in a specific time and place, Altman intentionally adds the viewer into the conversation, even after repeated viewings where one’s view may shift or change through the years.  As an experiment of integrating multiple narratives into a cohesive whole, Altman has refined what he began in Brewster McCloud (1970), where fragmented pieces of mid 70’s American culture are reflected in the various characters, where each is vulnerable and hurt in some way, often seen as flawed and even foolish, but there’s also an underlying ugliness or moral stain in their own behavior, often conniving, hurting, or bringing harm to others, yet somehow, rationalized within their own collective conscience, this is acceptable behavior.  While there are moments of stunning emotional force, they are undercut by Altman’s direction and his continually shifting editing scheme, such as the moment Mr. Green (Keenan Wynn) during a routine hospital visit learns that his beloved wife has died, where his grief is quickly interrupted by a joltingly intrusive conversation from an upbeat soldier visiting another patient, who offhandedly remarks “You give my best to your wife” as Mr. Green literally crumbles before our eyes.  But rather than hold the shot for emotional effect, Altman quickly edits to another scene, keeping the audience at a distance, where the viewer remains an impartial observer witnessing various events as they unfold over the course of five days.

Despite the revolving door of quirky characters, in NASHVILLE they all seem to be on some kind of personal quest or journey, perhaps to get away from something while pursuing their dreams, like Barbara Harris as Winifred, seen abandoning her husband early on during a freeway pile-up of people all driving into the city of Nashville, transforming herself into Albuquerque, her chosen stage name, as she aspires to become a country western star, joining the legions of others all following the same yellow brick road to fame and fortune.  Part of the curiosity comes from characters asking others what they are doing in town, suggesting people are arriving for some major event, creating a sense of anticipation for the intersecting paths of a political campaign and a music festival.  Part of a running joke throughout is how quickly people in this town describe themselves as apolitical, disinterested in politics, or even declaring they don’t vote, confirming a tone of abject disinterest, yet all display undaunted enthusiasm for gaining a foot in the music business.  Somehow their fates are intertwined.  Political alienation is symptomatic of deeper, often unexplored issues, yet the political reality is passivity breeds manipulation, as the space you vacated leaves a spot open for ill-fated winds of empty rhetoric and hot air to blow while searching for a foothold in the political landscape.  Disinterest allows the ambitions of others to set the terms of their own politicized agenda, while you sit by and passively allow them to do it.  Similarly, the paying customers of these musical legends exude their own loss of identity, transferring all the power to the performer, often fawning over celebrities, where they are easily duped into becoming ardent believers, like submissive cult followers.  These competing interests of music and politics comprise the moral dilemma of many of the characters, especially the established musical stars, who don’t wish to be affiliated with any political party, but aren’t against a little back-roomed arm twisting if they think they can gain an advantage over their rival competitors.  What brings them together is both sides want attention, popularity, which in their eyes breeds success, as that is the nature of the business.  Again, the viewer remains an impartial observer sitting outside the events, so may render judgment on the ethical boundaries crossed in pursuit of both goals, especially how easily people allow themselves to be duped and fooled.  With so many different characters with personal agendas, what catches the viewer’s eye may be altogether different in subsequent viewings, which is part of the hidden beauty of the film, as it evolves as we do.  

Shot in only 45 days on a $2 million dollar budget, which was considered small, where each of the two dozen lead characters drew similar salaries somewhere between $750 to $1000/week, the film was originally conceived as a possible TV mini-series, where Altman shot a great deal of footage, viewing two hours of rushes every day, with the director at one point considering releasing the film in two parts, Nashville Red and Nashville Blue, before finally settling on a more conventional format.  But the film is anything but conventional, something like a sprawling epic trainwreck about to happen with plenty of detours along the way.  When the film was previewed in Boston by Paramount, the audience stood for several minutes both cheering and booing.  Joan Tewkesbury’s screenplay moves from one giant set piece to the next, a multi-car freeway pileup, recording sessions, night club performances, The Grand Ole Opry, an amateur night that becomes a strip show, to a gathering in front of the Parthenon (1,280 × 853 pixels) in Centennial Park.  Altman received a huge boost from the lavish praise received from film critic Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, calling it a masterpiece before it was even finished after seeing an early cut of the movie, describing Altman “as identifiable as a paragraph by Mailer when he’s really racing.  ‘Nashville’ is simply ‘the ultimate Altman movie’ we’ve been waiting for… It’s a pure emotional high, and you don’t come down when the picture is over,” actually comparing Altman’s methods to James Joyce in Ulysses.  In The New York Times, Vincent Canby protested: “If one can review a film on the basis of an approximately three-hour rough cut, why not review it on the basis of a five-hour rough cut?  A ten-hour one?  On the basis of a screenplay?  The original material if first printed as a book?”  While they used the script primarily as a guide, as the movie was shot almost entirely in sequence, the film is largely improvised by the actors, who spent a great amount of their time in character, each one individually mike’d for sound, where the use of multiple cameras prevented the actors from knowing precisely when they were on camera.  Each actor was required to write and perform their own songs for the movie, where Altman’s talent was juggling all the various storylines of the two dozen characters, creating clarity out of chaos.  

According to Altman:

I felt we were doing something that had the potential of being terrific. I had complete artistic freedom in this; I had nobody — nobody — saying you had to do this or do that....We had the framework, which was the city of Nashville, and I had the music as the through line. Then, you’ve got to understand that at that time everybody was politically charged — one way or another. So when they found out we were free to express these...attitudes, everybody became very creative.

Opening with the blaring noise of an advertisement for the film itself, where the announcer promises to proceed “without commercial interruption,” what follows is one continual commercial advertisement from a political campaign van driving through the streets spouting cliché’d political banalities that pass for wisdom, where Altman has a habit of celebrating the same interests and themes that he also subjects to ridicule.  A freeway multiple car pile-up leaves traffic at a standstill as Opal (Geraldine Chaplin), an alleged BBC Reporter, walks through the carnage of cars spouting platitudes into her pocket tape recorder about violence in America, as she arrives in town to do a story on Grand Ole Opry star Haven Hamilton, Henry Gibson from television’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (1970 – 73), a part originally intended for Robert Duvall, but his salary demands were too high.  Hamilton is recording an ode to our national heritage, “We must be doin’ somethin’ right to last 200 years,” but he’s amusingly interrupted by Opal’s invasion of the privacy of his studio, where she’s quickly escorted out into another studio where Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin) is cutting a record with a black gospel choir, where Opal rambles on into her recorder about “darkest Africa with its naked, frenzied bodies.”  Across town at the airport, fans are welcoming back the return of the reigning queen of country music, Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakely, a backup singer for Hoyt Axton, who met with Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton in preparation for the role originally intended for Susan Anspach), who’s been recovering from an injury and near-nervous breakdown, where her swoon causes a near panic, expecially from her nervously manipulating manager and husband Barnett (Allen Garfield). 

We follow the continued near misses of a folk trio, Bill and Mary (Allan Nichols and Cristina Raines) who keep missing Tom (Keith Carradine), who is sleeping with Mary while secretly attempting to pursue a solo career.  Tom also calls Linnea at home, hoping for a hotel tryst, where we learn she’s married to Delbert (Ned Beatty) while raising two deaf children.  Lily Tomlin’s role could  based on actress Louise Fletcher who was the child of deaf parents.  Ironically, Louise Fletcher won the Best Actress Award that same year for her role in a film that won all the major categories at the Academy Awards, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S BEST(1975).  Rising country star Connie White (Karen Black) takes advantage of Barbara Jean’s absence and fills in for her at the Grand Ole Opry.  While this music world is bustling with behind-the-scenes activities, with characters continually crossing paths, political advance man John Triplette (Michael Murphy) meets with Delbert to line up contacts, celebrities, pocketbooks, and entertainers for both a fund-raising smoker and an outdoor political rally at the Parthenon.  While there are more stars and secondary characters galore, with a beautiful interweaving of various interests and personalities, the three characters that really stand out are Lily Tomlin, also a regular on Laugh-In performing in her first film, whose grace and eloquence couldn’t be more surprising, whether singing in the choir, having a delightful sign language conversation with her kids, or sitting alone in a club actually listening to a song, turning that into one of the profound moments of the movie, where she may actually be the heart and soul of the film.  Geraldine Chaplin’s Opal is appallingly insensitive, yet she gets the majority of the laughs for her fawning celebrity worship, utter daffiness, and infinite rudeness, where she’s seen wandering aimlessly through vacant junkyards or a giant parking lot filled with yellow school busses spouting stream-of-conscience jibberish wherever she goes, where after stepping all over everyone to get close to anyone resembling a celebrity, she rejects even talking to the driver for Bill, Mary, and Tom, claiming, “I make it a policy never to speak to the servants.”  Finally, this film belongs to Barbara Harris, who makes the most of an underwritten part, yet she is probably the most hopeful and optimistic character in a film that is otherwise filled with people who might be described as unhappy, pathetic, devious, manipulative, miserable, or even delusional, where she takes the baton at the end and leads the crowd in a surprisingly soulful rendition of “It Don’t Worry Me,” Barbara Harris - It Don't Worry Me - YouTube (Film finale, 5:02), becoming a transcendent moment, where her rousing performance resurrects a shocked and stupefied audience, becoming the film’s driving force, an emblematic theme song that could easily become the Replacement Party’s choice for the replacement national anthem.      

rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert]  January 1,1975

After November 22, 1963 [the date of President Kennedy's assassination] and all the other days of infamy, I wouldn't have thought it possible that a film could have anything new or very interesting to say on assassination, but Nashville does, and the film's closing minutes with Barbara Harris finding herself, to her astonishment, onstage and singing, It Don't Worry Me are unforgettable and heartbreaking. Nashville, which seems so unstructured as it begins, reveals itself in this final sequence to have had a deep and very profound structure - but one of emotions, not ideas. This is a film about America. It deals with our myths, our hungers, our ambitions, and our sense of self. It knows how we talk and how we behave, and it doesn't flatter us but it does love us.