Disc Reviews

Nashville Blu-ray Review

• 9th Jun 2014

Robert Altman is a director most associated with his multi-cast stories of characters converging in one place: for The Player (1992) this was the Hollywood film industry itself, for Prêt-à-Porter (1994) people gather in Paris for the Paris Fashion Week, in Gosford Park (2001) it is the 1920s well-off who meet at a country house for a weekend and in A Prairie Home Companion (2006) folks meet up at a radio station for the last in a nostalgic home spun radio show. All of these films have a large ensemble cast with little in the way of discernible main characters but all are there for an almost sole purpose. The first of these kind of films that were to become a trademark for Altman was Nashville made way back in 1975. Eureka! Has released Nashville as part of their Masters of Cinema series and has its rightful place within this canon that the label is building.

Nashville takes place over a five day period and revolves around 24 characters who have gathered in the Country & Western capital of Nashville, Tennessee for a C&M festival. Among those that have gathered are a rather arrogant and ageing country singer called Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) with political ambitions who is seen at the beginning recording in the studio a rather dreadful flag waving anthem called ‘200 Years’. Present at the studio is a British journalist (but more likely a groupie) called Opal (Geraldine Chaplin) whom Hamilton has thrown out of the studio as well as a lacklustre pianist. Meanwhile at the airport there is political campaigning going on led by John Triplette (Michael Murphy) when country star Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakely) arrives with her entourage (Blakely’s character is based off Lynn Anderson). She is apparently recovering from a nervous breakdown and is clearly on the verge of another one. Also present are a country folk trio (based off Peter, Paul and Mary) and a gospel singer (Lily Tomlin) who is a mother to two deaf children and unhappy in her marriage to political figure Del Reese (Ned Beatty), she eventually having an affair with the vain lead from the country folk trio (Keith Carradine). Also in the cast in a small part is then little known Jeff Goldblum playing a biker riding around on a trike from one place to the next.

The film develops along these lines and many of the characters converge at some point including wannabe singers who can’t sing, a black country group, fans of Barbara Jean and an older man (Kennan Wynn) and his groupie niece (Shelley Duvall) with his dying wife. Clearly with such an interwoven cast it is not really credible to have a single lone voice. In fact the biggest stars in the film have walk-on parts because they happened to have been passing through Nashville at the time of filming and play themselves at a party: Elliott Gould and Julie Christie. The next biggest star at the time was Karen Black who plays a popular singer and bitter rival to Barbara Jean and only appears for about 20 minutes. The original idea for the film was a compromise by Altman in order that he could make a Depression set film called Thieves Like Us (1974) and was then asked to do a film about the resurgent country fad topping the charts with the likes of Lynn Anderson and Dolly Parton at the time by United Artists. He sent writer Joan Tewekesbury out to Nashville to scout and get some ideas and the basis of the story were notes from her diary, including the bizarre car crash that happen early on in the film that she witnessed while there. This diary became the basis for the film. What Altman also found that making the film on location he was unimpeded and unmolested by the usual interfering studios, particularly when they had a $1 million investment on a film. In addition the whole cast wrote and sang their own songs with some interesting and even surprising results as well as some very patchy ones. These include Carradine’s wonderful (and Oscar winning) song ‘I’m Easy’ and Blakely’s final tune before the surprise ending (which I won’t reveal), ‘My Own Idaho Home’.

When released the film was a critical success but was hated by C&W fans and aficionados who felt that they were being patronised, even the suggestion that getting the cast to write and perform their own tunes was a way of Altman stating that anyone can produce this homespun stuff if they set their mind to it. Indeed Altman never really denied this and has called country music as ‘populist’, almost as a sign of derision. However, today Nashville is popular to Country and Western fans. The film has not been seen much for some years. Years ago I had seen this film as part of a season on BBC2 called ‘The Great American Picture Show’ (which also included Thieves Like Us) and indeed the film is a fantastic voyeuristic snapshot of American life in the 1970s from the clothes and fashions to the Southern lifestyle and politics; the political sub-plot was something Altman included as an afterthought and does work really well from the running politician whom we never see but acts as a kind of humanistic narrator – saying the kind of stuff we wish our politicians would say as Altman puts in an interview on the on the disc extras. The political angle gives the film a certain balance. Viewing today, the film may not be as good as say The Player, but it certainly holds the viewer and has plenty of tongue-in-cheek wit about it that it tries to sustain for its long 160 minutes (there is one hour of performances here) until the very well-crafted last scene.

The extras on the disc include interviews with writer Tewkesbury and Michael Murphy but these are of little interest next to the more relevant and intelligent interviews carried out in 2000 and 2001 with Robert Altman (he also does the film commentary, in itself worth its weight of gold), the latter during his release of Gosford Park. It would perhaps have been better to edit these with stills and music from the film to have made a more appealing ‘Making Of’ film. Other than the four interviews there is also the usual fantastic 36 page booklet to accompany the disc with loads of good stills. What more could be expected from the ‘Eureka! Masters of Cinema’ series.

Chris Hick