\r\n\r\nBarbara Jean<\/SPAN><\/B> (quietly): no.
\r\n\r\nBarnett<\/SPAN><\/B>:\r\n\r\nThen don't you tell me how to run your life. I've been doing\r\n\r\npretty good with it.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
He then pressures her into wishing him a cheerful\r\n\r\ngoodbye, and after he's gone, she calls after him plaintively.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
It's a harrowing scene, all the more so because\r\n\r\nthere's no physical violence, and in fact she yells much more than he\r\n\r\ndoes and is more physically aggressive. But Barnett can afford to be\r\n\r\nquiet and wait for her to blow off her anger, because he's in charge\r\n\r\nand they both know it.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Barnett does get a little bit of a comeuppance at\r\n\r\nthe club, where both Haven Hamilton and Connie White completely ignore\r\n\r\nhim. Without Barbara Jean at his side, he's just another functionary,\r\n\r\nno more important than Delbert Reese, Haven's lawyer. Nobody pays\r\n\r\nmuch attention to Del except to make fun of his obtuseness.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
The scene in the hospital room is incredible, and we\r\n\r\nfeel Barbara Jean's desire to have the radio turned off, because we've\r\n\r\nseen the show at the Grand Old Opry, which ran the gamut from bland\r\n\r\n(Tommy Brown) to phony (Haven Hamilton, singing a song about marital\r\n\r\nfidelity as his mistress watches from a bench on the rear of the\r\n\r\nstage) to completely plastic (Connie White).<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Keep a-goin'<\/B><\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
The next killer scene is Barbara Jean's breakdown on\r\n\r\nstage at Opryland. Rushed into doing a performance pretty much the\r\n\r\nminute she was released from the hospital (you don't have to read very\r\n\r\nfar between the lines to see how much of a pattern this is), she sings\r\n\r\na couple of songs, then becomes disoriented, telling a long and\r\n\r\nincreasingly pointless anecdote (though the subtext of the anecdote is\r\n\r\nthat she's been \"singing for her supper\" since she was a pretty young\r\n\r\ngirl) until Barnett comes out and leads her off the stage.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
The film was made with a script, by Joan Tewkesbury,\r\n\r\nbut the actors brought a lot to it. There's quite a bit of\r\n\r\nimprovisation, and several key scenes were written by the actors.\r\n\r\nBarbara Jean's breakdown is one of those, and (as in many of the\r\n\r\nscenes) Altman set up a few different cameras, started them rolling\r\n\r\nand told Ronee Blakley to begin. The first time he (or the other\r\n\r\nactors) ever heard or saw the scene was when she was performing it for\r\n\r\nthe cameras.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
In addition, most of the songs were written or\r\n\r\nco-written by the actors. And, to the delight of all the musicians in\r\n\r\nthe audience, there is no dubbing or lip-syncing. All the music was\r\n\r\nrecorded live.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
The real climax of the movie is two scenes which cut\r\n\r\nback and forth near the end. One is at the smoker that John Triplette\r\n\r\nand Del Reese have set up. A group of local Nashville businessmen\r\n\r\nhave got together to donate money to Hal Philip Walker, and for their\r\n\r\nentertainment they'll get to see a stripper. The only problem is that\r\n\r\nnobody has bothered to tell the \"stripper\" exactly what she's being\r\n\r\npaid to do. She's Sueleen Gay, a majestically untalented singer who\r\n\r\nhas absolutely no idea that she's no good (she's sort of the Ed Wood\r\n\r\nof country music).<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
When Sueleen begins to realize that these men want\r\n\r\nmore from her than her terrible original songs and her off-key Barbara\r\n\r\nJean covers, she initially refuses to strip, but then Triplette, who\r\n\r\nwill say anything to anybody to get what he wants, takes her aside,\r\n\r\npraises her talent, and says that if she goes ahead with the\r\n\r\nstriptease, he'll give her her big break and let her sing at the\r\n\r\nParthenon rally the next day with her idol Barbara Jean.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Altman doesn't throw any winks to the audience about\r\n\r\nwhat a lie this is. By this point he doesn't have to. And so, Sueleen\r\n\r\ngoes through with the striptease, even making a sad little flourish\r\n\r\nout of pulling out the sweat socks she'd stuffed into her bra and\r\n\r\ntossing them into the crowd.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
The scene ends with Del Reese driving her home and\r\n\r\nclumsily propositioning her on her doorstep, until he's driven off by\r\n\r\nthe arrival of Sueleen's somewhat-boyfriend Wade. Sueleen tells Wade\r\n\r\nwhat she had to do, but then she fervently reasserts her belief in her\r\n\r\ntalent, and in the inevitability of her triumph. Nobody learns any\r\n\r\nbig life lessons in this film.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Yes, I do<\/B><\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Meanwhile, while Delbert is being rebuffed, his wife is being\r\n\r\nseduced. Throughout the film, folk\/rock singer Tom Frank (who is in\r\n\r\nNashville secretly recording a solo album that the rest of his group\r\n\r\nknows nothing about) has been seducing every woman he can get his hands on.\r\n\r\nMost of the liaisons are casual, including groupie LA Joan and \"Opal\r\n\r\nfrom the BBC,\" but one is more intense, since the woman is his\r\n\r\nbandmate Mary, and she's actually in love with him (and not with the third\r\n\r\nmember of their trio, her husband Bill).<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
But Mary only says \"I love you\" to Tom when he's\r\n\r\nsafely asleep, and in any case his attention isn't on her, it's on\r\n\r\nLinnea Reese, who he met at a recording studio. We've seen him call\r\n\r\nher a couple of times, obviously trying to set up an assignation with\r\n\r\nher, and at first she rebuffed him, but then the third time she has\r\n\r\nindicated that she's willing to come see him perform.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
The scene at the club is one of those situations\r\n\r\nwhere the intensity is only apparent to the musicians and those around\r\n\r\nthem, and is only obliquely seen by the audience. Bill and Mary are\r\n\r\nthere, along with their limo driver and Opal, who is supposed to be\r\n\r\ninterviewing them but is mostly talking about herself. LA Joan is\r\n\r\nthere also, as is Wade.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
A lot of things are going on at once.\r\n\r\nLinnea is attempting to be inconspicuous at a rear table, but Wade\r\n\r\nimmediately starts to make friendly overtures. Meanwhile, Opal is\r\n\r\nattempting to drop casual hints that she's been having an affair with\r\n\r\nTom (or, really, a one-night stand), oblivious to the fact that\r\n\r\n(for different reasons) Bill and Mary aren't really fascinated (or\r\n\r\nsurprised) by this information.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Meanwhile, Tom is called up to the stage to do a\r\n\r\nnumber, and (after doing a song with Bill and Mary) he sings \"I'm\r\n\r\nEasy,\" which is, in its way, as unintentionally self-revealing as\r\n\r\nHaven Hamilton's songs. As Mary could tell you, he's anything but\r\n\r\neasy.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
But he's not singing to her, he's singing to Linnea,\r\n\r\nthough both Opal and LA Joan seem willing to think he's singing to or\r\n\r\nabout them. Mary is wise to him, though. She looks around the club,\r\n\r\nknowing that he's working on somebody,\r\n\r\ntrying to figure out who it is.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
And the seduction works, the next thing we see is Tom\r\n\r\nand Linnea in bed together. Tom is obviously somewhat taken with her,\r\n\r\nfor the first time we see him actually talk to a woman he's in bed\r\n\r\nwith. She teaches him the sign language for \"I love you\" and for \"I'm\r\n\r\nglad I met you,\" and he's actually honest enough to use the latter\r\n\r\nrather than the former.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
But then he wants her to stay, and she gets up to\r\n\r\nleave anyway, and suddenly it's pretty obvious that she's been doing\r\n\r\nthis on her terms, and that for once Tom isn't in charge. He picks up\r\n\r\nthe phone to call his girlfriend in New York, before Linnea has even\r\n\r\nleft the room, but he doesn't succeed in convincing her to come down\r\n\r\nto Nashville to visit him,\r\n\r\nand suddenly it seems like Tom Frank is surrounded by women who have\r\n\r\nfigured him out. For someone like him, that's probably the final\r\n\r\ncircle of hell.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
So, in each scene, the power has not been quite\r\n\r\nwhere the characters thought it was. The men organizing the smoker\r\n\r\nthought they were getting a stripper, a professional, and instead they\r\n\r\ngot an aspiring singer who they had to lie to in order to get her to\r\n\r\nhumiliate herself. In the other scene, the nearly saintly Linnea\r\n\r\n(wife of a no-good husband, gospel singer with a Black choir, mother\r\n\r\nof two deaf children who will never hear their mother sing) has turned\r\n\r\nout to be quite an efficient adulterer, nothing like the pigeon that\r\n\r\nTom Frank thought he was pursuing. The shift in each case is subtle,\r\n\r\nbut the combined effect of the two scenes is tremendous, and each\r\n\r\ninvolves a women being exploited (or, for a moment, not being exploited) by men.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
After these two scenes, and the two with Barbara Jean\r\n\r\nthat I talked about before, the actual \"climax\" of the film almost\r\n\r\ncomes as a little bit of a letdown.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Let me be the 1 (one)<\/B><\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
The movie is full of wonderful women who have ended\r\n\r\nup with men who clearly don't deserve them. Barbara Jean and Barnett,\r\n\r\nLinnea and Delbert Reese, and poor Mary, who's got two of them (Bill\r\n\r\nand Tom). And the dynamics in each case are very different, and each is also\r\n\r\nvery typical. Linnea is the wife of a pretty successful lawyer, so\r\n\r\nshe can occupy herself with her disabled children (significantly, she\r\n\r\nunderstands sign language, but her husband doesn't), her music, and\r\n\r\nreligion. In fact, I suspect that's pretty much what's possible for\r\n\r\nher to occupy her time with.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Barbara Jean's story is the opposite, on the\r\n\r\nsurface, because she's the breadwinner, the (one assumes) sole asset\r\n\r\nof \"Barnett Enterprises,\" but of course it's Barnett who runs\r\n\r\neverything. In point of fact, Barbara Jean has fewer options than\r\n\r\nLinnea does, and it doesn't take much to imagine that various kinds of\r\n\r\nbreakdowns are (consciously or not) the only way she has of asserting\r\n\r\nany control over her own life.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Mary is younger and obviously has more options. She\r\n\r\nsees her husband and her lover pretty clearly, but we're not shown\r\n\r\nwhat decisions she's going to make. At the Parthenon rally, she's\r\n\r\nwith Tom (and Bill, amusingly, is with LA Joan), but when the trouble\r\n\r\nstarts, Bill grabs Mary to get her to safety.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
But, fortunately, the movie is not all good women\r\n\r\nand not-so-good men. LA Joan is a shallow groupie, Opal is a nut, Lady\r\n\r\nPearl (Haven Hamilton's mistress) is a harridan, and Connie White is a\r\n\r\ncomplete phony.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
As for the men, Wade's patience with Sueleen is\r\n\r\namazing, Mr. Green's entire life seems to revolve around caring for\r\n\r\nhis dying wife, and even Haven Hamilton comes off better than you'd\r\n\r\nexpect at the end. When the crisis comes, he thinks about everybody\r\n\r\nelse, about keeping the situation from getting worse, before he thinks\r\n\r\nabout himself.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Nashville II<\/B><\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Nashville<\/I> haunts Altman a bit, I think,\r\n\r\nbecause it did represent his peak, not only creatively, but in terms\r\n\r\nof his clout and respect in Hollywood. It was right after Nashville<\/I>\r\n\r\nthat he was scheduled to direct Ragtime<\/I>, before being booted off the\r\n\r\nproject in favor of Milos Forman after the producers got a look at\r\n\r\nBuffalo Bill and the Indians<\/I> (but that's another story). For years\r\n\r\nhe wanted to make a sequel to Nashville<\/I>, the only time he has ever\r\n\r\nwanted to direct a sequel to one of his pictures, as far as I know.\r\n\r\nAnd what was Short Cuts<\/I> but an attempt to do another Nashville<\/I>,\r\n\r\nonly (for most of it) less satisfying and much more mean-spirited.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
I can think of a few movies in recent years that were\r\n\r\nobviously strongly influenced by Nashville<\/I>\r\n\r\n(Lone Star<\/I>, for one)\r\n\r\nand I think we have to regard Magnolia<\/I> as a deliberate homage, since\r\n\r\nnot only is it very similar in structure, but it shares not one but two cast\r\n\r\nmembers: Henry Gibson and Michael Murphy.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
The July 2000 issue of Premiere<\/I> Magazine contained a wonderful\r\n\r\narticle<\/A>\r\n\r\nabout\r\n\r\nNashville<\/I> in honor of its 25th anniversary, including interviews with almost\r\n\r\nall of the surviving cast\r\n\r\nmembers, Joan Tewkesbury and Robert Altman. They reminisce about the\r\n\r\nmaking of the film, telling some wonderful stories, including\r\n\r\nconfirming a belief that I've held for a long time, which is that\r\n\r\n\"Opal from the BBC\" is a complete phony, and that the reason she can\r\n\r\nnever locate her cameraman is that she doesn't have one. She's not\r\n\r\nmaking a documentary for anybody, let alone for the BBC.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n So, overall, it's a fascinating slice of twenty-four\r\n\r\nindividual lives over three days. Two people die, but nobody else (as\r\n\r\nfar as we can tell) has been changed in any major way. But we've seen\r\n\r\na lot, both big and small, about how life was in the United States in\r\n\r\n1975, and now, as well.<\/P>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Nashville<\/BIG> 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[36,33],"class_list":["post-1129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-movie-reviews-2","tag-robert-altman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1129"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3290,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1129\/revisions\/3290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
(1975)<\/SPAN><\/B>
\r\n\r\nDirected by Robert Altman
\r\n\r\nWritten by Joan Tewkesbury
\r\n\r\nCast:<\/SPAN><\/B>
\r\n\r\nNorman : David Arkin
\r\n\r\nLady Pearl : Barbara Baxley
\r\n\r\nDelbert Reese : Ned Beatty
\r\n\r\nConnie White : Karen Black
\r\n\r\nBarbara Jean : Ronee Blakley
\r\n\r\nTommy Brown : Timothy Brown
\r\n\r\nTom Frank : Keith Carradine
\r\n\r\nOpal : Geraldine Chaplin
\r\n\r\nWade Cooley : Robert DoQui
\r\n\r\nLA Joan (Martha) : Shelley Duvall
\r\n\r\nBarnett : Alan Garfield
\r\n\r\nHaven Hamilton : Henry Gibson
\r\n\r\nPFC Glenn Kelly : Scott Glenn
\r\n\r\nTricycle Man : Jeff Goldblum
\r\n\r\nWinifred (Albuquerque) : Barbara Harris
\r\n\r\nKenny Fraiser : David Hayward
\r\n\r\nJohn Triplette : Michael Murphy
\r\n\r\nBill : Allan Nicholls
\r\n\r\nBud Hamilton : Dave Peel
\r\n\r\nMary : Christina Raines
\r\n\r\nStar : Bert Remsen
\r\n\r\nLinnea Reese : Lily Tomlin
\r\n\r\nSueleen Gay : Gwen Welles
\r\n\r\nMr. Green : Keenan Wynn![\"image_pdf\"](\"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/wp-content\/plugins\/pdf-print\/images\/pdf.png\" "\\"View")
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