Nashville is the story of twenty-four characters in the
country music capital over four days during a presidential campaign.
Most of the characters are involved with the music business in one way
or another, and those run the gamut from Winifred, who impulsively
leaves her music-hating husband to try to reinvent herself as "a
country music singer, or a star," to the king and queen of country
music, Haven Hamilton and Barbara Jean.
The characters are all in the same place only at the
beginning and the end of the film. In between, they come and go and run
into each other in all different combinations.
The movie opens (after a couple of preliminary
vignettes, including introducing the sound trucks of independent
Presidential candidate Hal Philip Walker, which thread through the
film like the PA announcements in M*A*S*H) in a recording studio where
Haven Hamilton is recording his ponderous Bicentennial anthem, "200
Years" (the stirring chorus is "we must be doing something right to
last two hundred years"). In the smaller studio next door, Linnea
Reese records with a Black gospel choir.
Pretty much all the rest of the characters are at
the airport soon after that, and from there all the characters head
off in their various directions, coming together again only at the
end, at the huge Hal Philip Walker rally.
Nashville and Washington
Politics and music are the movie's two most obvious
concerns, as Walker's advance man John Triplette moves to sign up
talent both for a late-night smoker with local businessmen, and for
the rally at Nashville's Parthenon. Robert Altman took a lot of flack
after the movie was released, for making fun of country music and
country musicians, and his response was that the movie wasn't about
Nashville, it was about Washington.
I see the point he was trying to make, but I don't
think this is true, nor is it the answer to the question.
The answer to the question of whether he's mocking
the music or not is right there in the soundtrack. On one hand, there's
Haven Hamilton, with his garish white outfits, his unctuous manner,
his fatuous and self-revealing songs, and his croaking voice. As a
character, he's almost more of a politician than an entertainer.
But on the other hand, there's Barbara Jean. Her
songs are wonderful and Ronee Blakley, the actress who plays her,
sings the hell out of them. I don't think anybody could see how
Barbara Jean is treated by her husband and manager, Barnett, and then
hear her sing "Careless Disrespect" and think the movie or Altman is
mocking her. And, it's immediately after she sings that song at
Opryland that she breaks down on stage.
The truth is, Nashville is no major statement on
politics and government. It is very much concerned with power, but
mostly with other kinds of power. I saw Nashville when it was
released, and I saw it again a month ago (and many times in between)
and in a quarter century my opinion has remained the same. What this
movie is about, more than anything else, is the women.
Mr. A. and the Women
Every time I see it, there are three parts which hit
me the hardest. The first takes place in Barbara Jean's hospital room.
Her public appearance earlier that day at the airport, planned to
celebrate her return to Nashville after treatment at a center for
burns (this is never explained) ended with her collapsing. All day
the hospital room was full of family, friends, well-wishers and
hangers-on, but now it's just her and Barnett. Barbara Jean had been
supposed to sing at the Grand Old Opry that night, but instead she and
Barnett listen on the radio as Connie White, her hated rival, fills in
for her.
Barbara Jean throws a tantrum when Barnett won't
turn the radio off, and it escalates when he tells her he needs to go
to see Connie and Haven and the rest later on, so he can thank Connie
personally from Barbara Jean.
When she subsides into tears, Barnett demands to
know if she's going to have another nervous breakdown, and then tells
her that she'd better shape up, because he won't stand for her having
another breakdown.
Barnett:
Have I ever told you how to sing a song?
Barbara Jean (quietly): no.
Barnett:
Then don't you tell me how to run your life. I've been doing
pretty good with it.
He then pressures her into wishing him a cheerful
goodbye, and after he's gone, she calls after him plaintively.
It's a harrowing scene, all the more so because
there's no physical violence, and in fact she yells much more than he
does and is more physically aggressive. But Barnett can afford to be
quiet and wait for her to blow off her anger, because he's in charge
and they both know it.
Barnett does get a little bit of a comeuppance at
the club, where both Haven Hamilton and Connie White completely ignore
him. Without Barbara Jean at his side, he's just another functionary,
no more important than Delbert Reese, Haven's lawyer. Nobody pays
much attention to Del except to make fun of his obtuseness.
The scene in the hospital room is incredible, and we
feel Barbara Jean's desire to have the radio turned off, because we've
seen the show at the Grand Old Opry, which ran the gamut from bland
(Tommy Brown) to phony (Haven Hamilton, singing a song about marital
fidelity as his mistress watches from a bench on the rear of the
stage) to completely plastic (Connie White).
Keep a-goin'
The next killer scene is Barbara Jean's breakdown on
stage at Opryland. Rushed into doing a performance pretty much the
minute she was released from the hospital (you don't have to read very
far between the lines to see how much of a pattern this is), she sings
a couple of songs, then becomes disoriented, telling a long and
increasingly pointless anecdote (though the subtext of the anecdote is
that she's been "singing for her supper" since she was a pretty young
girl) until Barnett comes out and leads her off the stage.
The film was made with a script, by Joan Tewkesbury,
but the actors brought a lot to it. There's quite a bit of
improvisation, and several key scenes were written by the actors.
Barbara Jean's breakdown is one of those, and (as in many of the
scenes) Altman set up a few different cameras, started them rolling
and told Ronee Blakley to begin. The first time he (or the other
actors) ever heard or saw the scene was when she was performing it for
the cameras.
In addition, most of the songs were written or
co-written by the actors. And, to the delight of all the musicians in
the audience, there is no dubbing or lip-syncing. All the music was
recorded live.
The real climax of the movie is two scenes which cut
back and forth near the end. One is at the smoker that John Triplette
and Del Reese have set up. A group of local Nashville businessmen
have got together to donate money to Hal Philip Walker, and for their
entertainment they'll get to see a stripper. The only problem is that
nobody has bothered to tell the "stripper" exactly what she's being
paid to do. She's Sueleen Gay, a majestically untalented singer who
has absolutely no idea that she's no good (she's sort of the Ed Wood
of country music).
When Sueleen begins to realize that these men want
more from her than her terrible original songs and her off-key Barbara
Jean covers, she initially refuses to strip, but then Triplette, who
will say anything to anybody to get what he wants, takes her aside,
praises her talent, and says that if she goes ahead with the
striptease, he'll give her her big break and let her sing at the
Parthenon rally the next day with her idol Barbara Jean.
Altman doesn't throw any winks to the audience about
what a lie this is. By this point he doesn't have to. And so, Sueleen
goes through with the striptease, even making a sad little flourish
out of pulling out the sweat socks she'd stuffed into her bra and
tossing them into the crowd.
The scene ends with Del Reese driving her home and
clumsily propositioning her on her doorstep, until he's driven off by
the arrival of Sueleen's somewhat-boyfriend Wade. Sueleen tells Wade
what she had to do, but then she fervently reasserts her belief in her
talent, and in the inevitability of her triumph. Nobody learns any
big life lessons in this film.
Yes, I do
Meanwhile, while Delbert is being rebuffed, his wife is being
seduced. Throughout the film, folk/rock singer Tom Frank (who is in
Nashville secretly recording a solo album that the rest of his group
knows nothing about) has been seducing every woman he can get his hands on.
Most of the liaisons are casual, including groupie LA Joan and "Opal
from the BBC," but one is more intense, since the woman is his
bandmate Mary, and she's actually in love with him (and not with the third
member of their trio, her husband Bill).
But Mary only says "I love you" to Tom when he's
safely asleep, and in any case his attention isn't on her, it's on
Linnea Reese, who he met at a recording studio. We've seen him call
her a couple of times, obviously trying to set up an assignation with
her, and at first she rebuffed him, but then the third time she has
indicated that she's willing to come see him perform.
The scene at the club is one of those situations
where the intensity is only apparent to the musicians and those around
them, and is only obliquely seen by the audience. Bill and Mary are
there, along with their limo driver and Opal, who is supposed to be
interviewing them but is mostly talking about herself. LA Joan is
there also, as is Wade.
A lot of things are going on at once.
Linnea is attempting to be inconspicuous at a rear table, but Wade
immediately starts to make friendly overtures. Meanwhile, Opal is
attempting to drop casual hints that she's been having an affair with
Tom (or, really, a one-night stand), oblivious to the fact that
(for different reasons) Bill and Mary aren't really fascinated (or
surprised) by this information.
Meanwhile, Tom is called up to the stage to do a
number, and (after doing a song with Bill and Mary) he sings "I'm
Easy," which is, in its way, as unintentionally self-revealing as
Haven Hamilton's songs. As Mary could tell you, he's anything but
easy.
But he's not singing to her, he's singing to Linnea,
though both Opal and LA Joan seem willing to think he's singing to or
about them. Mary is wise to him, though. She looks around the club,
knowing that he's working on somebody,
trying to figure out who it is.
And the seduction works, the next thing we see is Tom
and Linnea in bed together. Tom is obviously somewhat taken with her,
for the first time we see him actually talk to a woman he's in bed
with. She teaches him the sign language for "I love you" and for "I'm
glad I met you," and he's actually honest enough to use the latter
rather than the former.
But then he wants her to stay, and she gets up to
leave anyway, and suddenly it's pretty obvious that she's been doing
this on her terms, and that for once Tom isn't in charge. He picks up
the phone to call his girlfriend in New York, before Linnea has even
left the room, but he doesn't succeed in convincing her to come down
to Nashville to visit him,
and suddenly it seems like Tom Frank is surrounded by women who have
figured him out. For someone like him, that's probably the final
circle of hell.
So, in each scene, the power has not been quite
where the characters thought it was. The men organizing the smoker
thought they were getting a stripper, a professional, and instead they
got an aspiring singer who they had to lie to in order to get her to
humiliate herself. In the other scene, the nearly saintly Linnea
(wife of a no-good husband, gospel singer with a Black choir, mother
of two deaf children who will never hear their mother sing) has turned
out to be quite an efficient adulterer, nothing like the pigeon that
Tom Frank thought he was pursuing. The shift in each case is subtle,
but the combined effect of the two scenes is tremendous, and each
involves a women being exploited (or, for a moment, not being exploited) by men.
After these two scenes, and the two with Barbara Jean
that I talked about before, the actual "climax" of the film almost
comes as a little bit of a letdown.
Let me be the 1 (one)
The movie is full of wonderful women who have ended
up with men who clearly don't deserve them. Barbara Jean and Barnett,
Linnea and Delbert Reese, and poor Mary, who's got two of them (Bill
and Tom). And the dynamics in each case are very different, and each is also
very typical. Linnea is the wife of a pretty successful lawyer, so
she can occupy herself with her disabled children (significantly, she
understands sign language, but her husband doesn't), her music, and
religion. In fact, I suspect that's pretty much what's possible for
her to occupy her time with.
Barbara Jean's story is the opposite, on the
surface, because she's the breadwinner, the (one assumes) sole asset
of "Barnett Enterprises," but of course it's Barnett who runs
everything. In point of fact, Barbara Jean has fewer options than
Linnea does, and it doesn't take much to imagine that various kinds of
breakdowns are (consciously or not) the only way she has of asserting
any control over her own life.
Mary is younger and obviously has more options. She
sees her husband and her lover pretty clearly, but we're not shown
what decisions she's going to make. At the Parthenon rally, she's
with Tom (and Bill, amusingly, is with LA Joan), but when the trouble
starts, Bill grabs Mary to get her to safety.
But, fortunately, the movie is not all good women
and not-so-good men. LA Joan is a shallow groupie, Opal is a nut, Lady
Pearl (Haven Hamilton's mistress) is a harridan, and Connie White is a
complete phony.
As for the men, Wade's patience with Sueleen is
amazing, Mr. Green's entire life seems to revolve around caring for
his dying wife, and even Haven Hamilton comes off better than you'd
expect at the end. When the crisis comes, he thinks about everybody
else, about keeping the situation from getting worse, before he thinks
about himself.
Nashville II
Nashville haunts Altman a bit, I think,
because it did represent his peak, not only creatively, but in terms
of his clout and respect in Hollywood. It was right after Nashville
that he was scheduled to direct Ragtime, before being booted off the
project in favor of Milos Forman after the producers got a look at
Buffalo Bill and the Indians (but that's another story). For years
he wanted to make a sequel to Nashville, the only time he has ever
wanted to direct a sequel to one of his pictures, as far as I know.
And what was Short Cuts but an attempt to do another Nashville,
only (for most of it) less satisfying and much more mean-spirited.
I can think of a few movies in recent years that were
obviously strongly influenced by Nashville
(Lone Star, for one)
and I think we have to regard Magnolia as a deliberate homage, since
not only is it very similar in structure, but it shares not one but two cast
members: Henry Gibson and Michael Murphy.
The July 2000 issue of Premiere Magazine contained a wonderful
article
about
Nashville in honor of its 25th anniversary, including interviews with almost
all of the surviving cast
members, Joan Tewkesbury and Robert Altman. They reminisce about the
making of the film, telling some wonderful stories, including
confirming a belief that I've held for a long time, which is that
"Opal from the BBC" is a complete phony, and that the reason she can
never locate her cameraman is that she doesn't have one. She's not
making a documentary for anybody, let alone for the BBC.
So, overall, it's a fascinating slice of twenty-four
individual lives over three days. Two people die, but nobody else (as
far as we can tell) has been changed in any major way. But we've seen
a lot, both big and small, about how life was in the United States in
1975, and now, as well.
Nashville
(1975)
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Joan Tewkesbury
Cast:
Norman : David Arkin
Lady Pearl : Barbara Baxley
Delbert Reese : Ned Beatty
Connie White : Karen Black
Barbara Jean : Ronee Blakley
Tommy Brown : Timothy Brown
Tom Frank : Keith Carradine
Opal : Geraldine Chaplin
Wade Cooley : Robert DoQui
LA Joan (Martha) : Shelley Duvall
Barnett : Alan Garfield
Haven Hamilton : Henry Gibson
PFC Glenn Kelly : Scott Glenn
Tricycle Man : Jeff Goldblum
Winifred (Albuquerque) : Barbara Harris
Kenny Fraiser : David Hayward
John Triplette : Michael Murphy
Bill : Allan Nicholls
Bud Hamilton : Dave Peel
Mary : Christina Raines
Star : Bert Remsen
Linnea Reese : Lily Tomlin
Sueleen Gay : Gwen Welles
Mr. Green : Keenan Wynn