by Chris Feil
We don’t really think of Robert Altman’s Nashville as a musical. To be fair, it both is and it isn’t. As is trademark for the director, the film is focused on character first to reveal its themes, exposing a distinctly American disposition both in its specific social strata and in the grander national sense. But Nashville isn’t always interested in doing so through song. Even taking place in the country music world, music feels like an equal contributor to Altman’s portraiture as any of the ensemble members.
Viewers wanting Altman to languor in the thematic sway of a musical’s tunes will always have A Prairie Home Companion. Instead here he upends genre traditions much as he does general narrative ones. Musicals are a genre that even at its best can still feel the least spontaneous, and spontaneity is a definitive Altman trait...
Instead everything around the music seems to be serving what Altman is trying to achieve rather than underline it - it’s essential to the world he creates, but as inconsequential to the personal and political of that world as it perhaps is to Altman.
One of the grimmer business aspects of the country music scene (and by extension, the American machine) Altman depicts is its divorce from the actual artist as individual. We bear harshest witness to this with Ronee Blakley’s Barbara Jean. She’s unwell and unadjusted, shoved onto the stage to quickly hostile crowd, with the scene led by the tension of her fragility and the gaze of her eventual killer. We remember the ensuing breakdown for Blakley’s brilliant turn and the cruelty of how this expected end represents America’s capitalistic indifference to an individual’s well-being. But do we remember the songs she sings? Are we even supposed to?
Even the film’s classic, indelible Oscar-winning song “I’m Easy” is striking for what happens while the song occurs rather than what the song itself is illuminating. The crowd, especially the women stare on as Keith Carradine embodies relaxed sexual cool. It’s a series of eyefuckings in closeup, but it’s Lily Tomlin’s Linnea that he locks eyes with. Altman alternately captures Linnea from afar, pulling into her face in the crowd to show that her attraction reaches something deeper and more spiritually longing than just loins. It’s edited with a musical rhythm, mounting into a breathless intensity grounded by Carradine’s steadiness. But turn off the sound, and Altman is still the one telling the story.
The film’s most musically-led sequence is its finale, Barbara Harris leading the rally crowd with “It Don’t Worry Me”. The song begins as an act of desperation, crowd control after a gunman has shot Barbara Jean. It’s a rousing bluegrass, gospel number, the kind of catchy refrain easy to fall into. The crowd naturally follows suit. As the gatherers quickly forget what they’ve just witnessed for the sake of warm group feeling and the song repeats its lyrics of indifference, we’re struck by a vision of American disconnection at its political and social core.
Hardly the kind of cheerful finale that musicals are typically accustomed, Altman naturally innovates and leaves us with something unsettling.
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