Never Seen It #244: Nashville

Who do you think is running Congress? Farmers? Engineers? Teachers? Businessmen? No, my friends. Congress is run by bloggers. A blogger is trained for two things and two things only. To watch 400 movies they've never seen before—that's one. And to confuse—that's the other thing. He does whichever is to his client's advantage.

Nashville

1975

Robert Altman

Thanks to Group F for picking this week's group discussion movie! Check out our thoughts below, and then hop down into the comments for some more. Why? Because I'm easy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Catherine

I had no clue where to begin, because this movie feels like a moving train that you have to time a running jump onto. You in? Cause the ride's going with or without you. I'll start with a phrase I learned in academia to sum up the film then back it up with thorough evidence: GOOD STUFF!

Man, I loved this movie. If I had to describe the plot to someone, I'm not sure I could do it justice. It's 1975. It's Nashville. Shut up! Robert Altman does no handholding as he peels back the curtain on a rich, preexisting universe, and it was a delight to be a fly on the wall as these characters' stories played out and interwove. And what an unbelievable feat to present a cast of 24 main characters that hold your attention and leave you (well, me) completely invested from beginning to end. I can't think of another film that's been able to pull that off so well.

I'm very attracted to the idea of celebrating America and shitting on it at the same time and this movie scratched that itch for me in a great way. The twee honky-tonk performances were beautifully blended with the ominous, faceless sermons of politician Hal Philip Walker, offering just enough warning of the storm brewing ahead of that devastating ending. There's no going home after that.

And special shoutout to the British interloper trying to get the seedy scoop on bicentennial Nashville's goings-on. She's desperate to uncover this elusive dark underbelly of the US while missing everything staring her right in the face. Amazing casting and comic relief.

4.5/5 Shelley Duvall wigs

(Slight points off for length)

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Kait

I could not finish this film for mainly two reasons, and it makes me chuckle that I just discovered these two things are part of the film/director's distinct (and highly praised) storytelling techniques. 

First, the overlapping dialogue drove me bonkers. I had the hardest time figuring out who was saying what and to whom and who I was supposed to be paying attention to. A scene would come and go, and so much dialogue was exchanged between the cluster of people in a hospital room. Yet, I hadn't a clue where we were or where we were going. Turns out, overlapping dialogue is the director's signature sound technique. Would you look at that!

Second, I could not stay focused on all the characters and their overlapping storylines and how they did or did not connect to each other. I couldn't even figure out names and thought that country singer was the politician running for president. He's not. Also turns out that this is part of the film's allure because it speaks to human connection and unconventional plot lines.

Who knew!? Not me. And let me say that I have been thinking about this and am somewhat embarrassed of my inability to focus on the movie. I blame Mark Zuckerberg and tech oligarchs and the destructive attention economy. 

Now that I've read the full plot and some reviews, I reckon I would've liked this film more had my brain been able to actually pay attention to it. While perhaps the plot is not easy to follow (and maybe there isn't even much of one?), I did enjoy how the movie captured what it looks and sounds like when you throw a bunch of people in one place at one time. Kinda messy, hard to hear, a few great outfits, some questionable weirdos, monologues about the Kennedys, a mix of sad, desperate, hopeful, and fine. That's cool. I wish I had been able to sit through it all from start to finish. 

I also keep thinking about that van and the political candidate's message that played on loudspeaker throughout the movie. Like this omnipresent stream of consciousness that, for a good two to three minutes, blamed lawyers for all the problems in politics. I'm a lawyer, and don't entirely disagree. These messages to me represent the ever-present intersection of the personal and the political. Same with that one particular scene where that wife who left her husband is walking out of a parking lot and two cars get in a crash. Then, out of nowhere, two campaign workers show up and put campaign posters on the bumpers of the cars. Ope sorry did you not want to think about politics in the midst of your car crash? Well, too bad. Politics will find you no matter where or what the occasion. 

I'll give it a 2/5 since I didn't even finish the damn thing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Joe

Nashville is the kind of movie that gets you to think about music. Like, the purpose of music. What we use it for. It's art for sure, but it can also be utilitarian. The music featured in Nashville is hokey, amateur, shockingly bad at times. But this isn't me disagreeing with Nashville. I think we're on the same page. Music can be a distraction. In the midst of trauma, it's totally valid to say something like: "Come on everybody, sing! Somebody sing!"

The film is saying that that can be helpful, and it can be detrimental, and it can occasionally be both. Witness that final scene. Albuquerque steps up to follow Haven's instructions to sing, damn it, sing... and she sings her fucking heart out. The faces in the crowd say that it's working. She's giving them courage to withstand the latest tragedy. She's doing that with music. You can look at this two ways. The optimistic way is to say that music heals. The pessimistic way is to say that music is a distraction from the REAL shit that's going on more than six inches from your ears. I think Nashville is saying that it's both. We listen to music to heal and to distract. It's okay.

"Distract" is the right word here. I was distracted while watching Nashville, at least for the first hour or so, and I think that's by design. The distraction was the sounds. It sounded real. In the real world, background characters in your life have voices too. In the real world, sometimes the sounds of car engines drown out what you're trying to say. Nashville gives an amazing sense of time and place, and it does so by letting the real world intrude on the dialogue. It was oddly thrilling, and mildly disorienting.

(I will contain this thought to the parentheses. There's a bit in Infinite Jest that explains how filmmaker Jim Incandenza gets freaked out over how extras in your typical sitcom don't speak, they just silently move their mouths in the background, and so he made it a point to have the extras in his movies make noise, have real conversation. It also mentions how many of Incandenza's films are nearly incomprehensible due to this. It's not exactly a 1-to-1, but I think both that and Nashville address realism in some way. Nashville implies that this is America as it currently is, with all its warts and all its noise, noise, noise. This has been your Infinite Jest paragraph, and I thank you for your time.)

I love how fucking ballsy this thing is. There's a climax but basically no real conclusion to any of the plotlines moving through the film. There's kinda sorta a main plotline in many of the main characters coming together for the musical political rally, but if that's the thread, it's a very loose thread. Otherwise, we just flit around to different gatherings, different combinations of characters in different settings (a car crash! a strip club! a BBQ! a racetrack!), dropping in on conversations that are already in progress. These are lives that have been lived up into the point we start spying, and these are lives that will continue (minus one) long after our cameras stop rolling. And the ballsiness comes in when the movie decides to explain nothing, and just let us watch, just for a little bit. It asks you to juggle 24 different characters for three hours and then lets you rest.

There is so much to discuss, but I keep coming back to the idea of music being the thesis here. It is a musical, after all, so it's not that much of a revelation. But I'm not talking about the songs themselves. I'm talking about the larger idea of music itself, and how we use music in society in order to survive. This is why it's so crushing when Sueleen Gay—previously assumed to be the comedic relief—receives the heartbreaking blow of the realization that she cannot sing, and that she's been presumed to be the stripper. This is also why it's so heartwrenching to see so many women in the crowd assume that Tom is singing his (Oscar-winning) song "I'm Easy" about them, and equally so that Linnea is the actual subject of the song, and is still treated so poorly in the hotel room later. Music is a cruel truth; music is a survival technique.

Nashville gets labeled as a "comedy," even though it's a dark, tragic film. The comedy, I think, comes from the fact that such ridiculously corny music can be utilized to wring such pathos out of so many real characters. Fuck, man... music.

GRADE: 4.5 pukes out of 5

~~~~~~~~~~

Sunny

I've often been confronted with the statement: I don't want to get mixed up in blogging. Or I'm tired of blogging, or I'm not interested. Almost as often someone says I can't do anything about it anyway. Let me point out two things. Number 1: All of us are deeply involved in blogging whether we know it or not, or whether we like it or not. And Number 2: we can do something about it. When you write more words than the original magna carta, that's blogging. When you have a random thought about a movie with no where to go, that's blogging. When you're trying to softly troll your real life friends online, that's blogging.

Now, let's consider our blog's national anthem.

What an ambitious and superb movie. It took us a little while, 20-30 minutes, to ‘get’ what was going on. Who are these people? Why is everyone talking over each other? What the fuck is going on? I had heard this movie was great, but with the length and the age, I started to worry that maybe it's too far away from my sensibilities to enjoy it. How wrong I was.

The Music pulls a lot of this together. In a movie where not a lot of plot happens, the setting of Nashville (the 25th or 26th character) as a backdrop of country music and cultural creation itself is a tying force. That early scene when we have Haven and Linnea contrasted in the recording studio (white vs black bicentennials) was funny, winking at the audience, but you didn't know where this movie was going. As the songs continued, the question started arising "Are these real country songs or parodies of country songs?" The answer being: Yes. There's a wide range of great tunes here, many of which cut twice.  Haven's song about breaking off his affair because of his three kids was next level.

The movie uses all its opportunities to make fun. And boy it gets funny. The aforementioned songs are great examples. But also: Opal, the clueless BBC correspondent,  an amazing prod at this outside-in reporting on "Nashville." All her racist comments, her walk through the bus graveyard, all the times other characters are escaping her, and her missing the finale—amazing. Jeff Goldblum the Psycho Freak who says nothing and does magic. Duvall's increasingly crazy outfits. The waitress who CANNOT SING. The scene where Carradine is singing his big song and like six girls all think he's singing to them.

Carradine wrote that song and won an Oscar for it. These actors wrote their songs, which I love. During those over-talking scenes, these guys are just riffing as if their characters would. This is actors getting into characters' heads. This is "method" without getting too weird about it, like Jared Leto being palanquined around. Despite having 24ish characters to track, you're able to get into the head and heart of the core dozen or so. Kelsey said it while we're watching: "These characters are so clearly driven, or rather, motivated." Tomlin puts forth an amazing performance. She's funny and interesting. I loved the tenderness of the scene with her and her deaf kids (after the gag of Opal saying how awful deafness was). Blakley is a force of nature, both believable as country music icon and woman currently in the middle of mental breakdown. The scene where she's going on shaggy dog tangents at the Grand Ole Opry is tough and feels real. Her whole arc is so sad, so tragic, so felt.

I guess on Altman, BOB rather, he's the crazy crank who was able to put this together. I heard actors loved working with him because he works with them to create and realize these full characters. (Reminds me of Mike Leigh, another notably different director). There's something in this process that works, that feels so natural, but I can also imagine that done poorly would produce a movie that's dogshit. Credit to the master. Sometimes film days would be two to three hours shooting, four hours of him hotboxing his trailer, and then him and the cast/crew partying at night. Rinse and repeat. That's how you make a movie. I haven't seen much Altman, despite the huge body of work, just The Player, which while very different, also takes aim at America and its cultural institutions and their production.

Hm, I guess on America. I haven't mentioned Hal Philip Walker at all, this "25th" character who's never seen, but is often around or in the background. There's this rambling track from his megaphone car that starts and pervades the movie. Like all cranks, half of what he says makes sense, and half is so far out there I can't imagine how he arrived. When he's not around, his army of college kids bumper sticker anywhere and anyone with REPLACEMENT PARTY.

It feels appropriate we never see or hear from Walker directly. That he and his convoy retreat after the incident at the political rally summarizes any sort of real politic. This movie's last ten minutes, man—what a gut punch. We show 'em this isn’t Dallas. We show 'em despite all the tragedy, all the pain, uhhh, it don't worry me! The slow tears and confused faces. Forget about it. Look at that enormous flag and pan up to that big old sky. You may say I ain't free, but it don't worry me!

Quite the full movie. I woke up the next day continuing to mull it over, and having an inkling to watch it again.

4.5/5 pukes, baby. I'm tempted to give it 5, but I gotta watch it at least one more time

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

GROUP AVERAGE GRADE: 3.88 pukes out of 5

And now that I'm older, grown up on my own, I still love Momma and Daddy best, my Idaho home, see you in the comments.

(NEXT TIME: na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na Batman)