By Robert Altman, 1975.
Starring David Arkin, Barbara Baxley, Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Timothy Brown, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert DoQui, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Henry Gibson, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, David Hayward, Michael Murphy, Allan Nicholls, Dave Peel, Cristina Raines, Bert Remsen, Lily Tomlin, Gwen Welles, Keenan Wynn.
Rating: 9.5/10, 9.5/10.
When Robert Altman’s Gosford Park came out, I saw an interview with him where he said something along the lines of "The most heartbreaking thing anyone says to me is ‘I saw your movie,’ because that means they only saw it once." This is not ego speaking (though I willingly grant a genius of Altman’s caliber the right to a big ego), but rather reality. If you’ve only seen a Robert Altman film once, you have not seen it. This is mostly because of the sheer number of characters in his movies: Nashville, famously, has twenty-four major characters. Though Altman is remarkably talented at juggling all these characters without it becoming too overwhelming, it is simply impossible to get to know every single one of them in the course of a two or three hour film. It usually takes me until partway through the second time seeing one of his movies to be confident that I know all of them. It is not that his movies aren’t immediately accessible, because they are. It’s more that there is such a surplus of information in them that they become new movies each time. Each time, a different character will seem to be a focus, each time we will discover more about each character.
Another major reason his movies need to be seen multiple times is that they are full of subtlety. His characters, much more than the characters in other films, are people. Real people live in and know a place. They know other people. They’ve had lives before the start of the film, and most of them will have lives after it ends. Because of this, Altman does not really introduce us to his characters; rather, he shows them to us, living their lives, until eventually we feel we know them. Then, once we do know them, it is a joy to go back and watch them from the beginning over again. For example, in Nashville we are never told what the relationship between a white diner waitress and a black dishwasher is; we just see them interacting—talking at work, driving home in the same car, him caring for her when she’s upset, and so forth—until we come to our own conclusions. Altman’s films remind us of just how much the camera—and therefore ourselves—is a character in most movies. Because the directors and writers feel the need to tell us who people are, it’s almost as if the characters were talking for our benefit, rather than their own; as if they knew they were being filmed and decided to help out the viewer by explaining their lives to us.
I saw Nashville for the first time about a month ago, but I knew that to properly review it I would have to watch it many more times. I have now seen it five or six times, and I have grown to love it. There is, in fact, so much to love about it that I don’t know where to start. The characters Opal (Geraldine Chaplin), Linnea (Lily Tomlin), and Sueleen Gay (Gwen Welles) stick in my head the most, but the other characters are all equally interesting. Some of the shots, and especially the cuts ("And cut that hair! You don’t belong in Nashville!"—cut to a gigantic "Weclome to Nashville!" banner) are especially memorable, but they’re all extra-ordinarily well-done. The songs are all wonderful, from the funny ones ("We must be doing something right to last 200 years"..."For the sake of the children, we must say good-bye") to the beautiful and, yes, uplifting "It Don’t Worry Me." The ever-so Altman moment of almost false catharsis at the end, featuring that song, is perhaps his best.
To see Nashville once is to like it. To see it twice is to enjoy it. To see it more than twice is to love it with all of the soul.
read roger ebert's essay on nashville