Review #230: 'Nashville' (1975)

Films with multiple storylines and an ensemble cast are commonplace nowadays, but it all stems, really, from this film - Robert Altman's formidable Nashville. Sure, there were films before that handled large casts before, but never before had a film so successfully told an overlying story using so many characters, and have their lives so delicately intertwined. These characters have full histories and complex natures, yet they are only glimpsed and suggested in short scenes that say more in two or three minutes than most films can manage in a feature length running time.

The film takes place over the course of five days in Nashville, Tennessee, and focuses around the minor and major players in the music business, and the hangers on that seem to always be around. The key characters are Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), a spangly-suited veteran singer with political ambitions, Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), a mentally unstable country music darling returning to her home town, Tom Frank (Keith Carradine), a member of a folk group trio who is trying to make it on his own and having as many woman as he can along the way, Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin), a white gospel singer who is being pursued by Tom, and Del Reese (Ned Beatty), Linnea's manager husband, who seems to be oblivious to the strain on his marriage. All their lives are interconnected and are usually linked by an incident or a set-piece.

The first scene of the film sees the campaign van for Presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker setting off for a tour around Nashville, and appears throughout the film. The film even climaxes at a political rally for Walker, with Hamilton and Barbara Jean both appearing on stage, and the scene brings together nearly all of the films' characters. Although I didn't get from the film that it is necessarily making any kind of political statement, it was made soon after the Watergate scandal, and was released to an America that was looking for answers. I think Nashville is making both a warm and cynical statement about the optimism and the arrogance of America, and also the confusion and the uncertainty that came with the 1970's.

Such is the beauty of Nashville. I couldn't sum up what it was about in one sentence, and couldn't describe a clear aim or message it was trying to deliver. It is a number of things, and touches a number of emotions. The real greatness is in its small moments, such as talentless and desperate aspiring country singer Sueleen Gay (Gwen Welles) singing to a room full of men, and then being told that she was brought there to strip; the cold detachment that Tom deals with Linnea when she reveals she can't stay any longer; the various characters who all think that Tom is singing to them in a crowded bar, as he gazes over them all to the back of the room; or the uncomfortable scene in which Barbara Jean keeps talking to an uneasy crowd rather than singing a song, as it becomes clear that she is truly losing her mind.

Nashville is one of the key films of the 1970's, and one of the finest examples of the American New Wave that emerged in that time, and produced some of the finest films to ever come out of the country. Although Altman had been around for a while at that time (he had already done the brilliant MASH (1970) and the thoroughly underrated revisionist western classic McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)), this is the film where he truly found his forte. It's been imitated endlessly, but never has a film managed to do so much with so many different stories. An absolute great, and one of the finest American films ever made.


Directed by: Robert Altman
Starring: Ned Beatty, Henry Gibson, Ronee Blakley, Lily Tomlin, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Michael Murphy, Gwen Welles, Scott Glenn
Country: USA

Rating: *****

Tom Gillespie