363 - Nashville, United States, 1975. Dir. Robert Altman.

Friday, December 29, 2017

363 - Nashville, United States, 1975.  Dir. Robert Altman.

The film Nashville is a mesmerizing, meandering, intoxicating piece of storytelling--and a terrible work of satire.

If you look to it for honest insights into the city or the music industry, you will be disappointed.  Maybe angry.  Altman did not bother to understand the subject matter about which he was filming.  Nor did he try.  Nor did he care.  And he admitted it.  He did no research in a library or with consultants or by spending time with actual people or events in the industry.  He simply came into town and started filming.  Years later on the DVD commentary he doubles down on his own ignorance, stating that he does not like the music.

He allowed his actors, not composers and singers, to write and sing their own songs.  While that approach fits his filmmaking style and is a dream for actors, the results are embarrassing.  The film contains over an hour of music, little of it worth listening to outside the context of the film.  Much of it not worth listening to inside the context of the film (although several of the songs, as songs can do, grow on you).  Not only does Altman show a lack of artistic integrity in this area, but he also shows a lack of business acumen.  What studio today would allow a music film to be made where you cannot sell the soundtrack?  And where the performers are supposed to be the top stars of the day!  The television series of the same name certainly corrected this offense.

But where Altman fails as an anthropologist, cultural historian, or satirist, he succeeds as a filmmaker.

The story in and of itself is hypnotic.  Altman has created a world--maybe not the real world, but a world--and he peoples it with complex and quirky characters.

And here is where he does what he does best.

The film snakes its way through the lives of twenty-four credited stars and several more supporting characters, moving endlessly back and forth among them over the course of five destiny-building days.  They all have their backstories, where they came from, how they got here, and why they are here now.  They all have their virtues and their vices, their needs and desires, their personalities, their relationships, their secrets.

The film was cut down from four hours to two hours and forty minutes, and frankly when you get to the end you wish it would keep going.  Four hours would have been fine.

The characters elicit the viewer's sympathy.  All of them.

You feel for Norman, the chauffeur for folk group Bill, Mary, and Tom, who has talent and wishes he were recognized for it.  When British reporter Opal, who otherwise lunges at everyone to get an interview, informs him she cannot talk to the "servants," after seeing him treated as a near equal by Bill, you understand the struggle of a large swath of artists.  His gifts run as deeply as theirs, and yet due to the seemingly random nature of popularity--who gets discovered when, by whom, and by how many--he must bide his time serving others while waiting for his break.

Thus, note that the most prominent role in the film for a real country music artist is held by Merle Kilgore as Trout.  Kilgore was a monster musician and songwriter, co-writing "Ring of Fire" with June Carter and writing Johnny Horton's hit "Johnny Reb."  Yet he also spent his life in service to the Hank Williams family, starting with Hank Williams at age fourteen and continuing to manage Hank Williams Jr., and his Bama Band, among others, until the day he died.  How many supporters of great talent are great talent themselves?

Then there is Lady Pearl, the girlfriend of singing legend Haven Hamilton, stuck in the past, a lone Catholic in a Protestant world, who still grieves over the loss of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and is able to provide specific vote counts by county regarding past Presidential elections.

Meanwhile, Haven Hamilton is king inside his recording booth--he can dump on keyboard player Frog when he misses a chord--but grovels in the presence of bigger stars--Elliott Gould at Hamilton's house and Julie Christie at the Grand Ole Opry.  He makes adjustments throughout the film in order to navigate the unstable world he inhabits.

Bill of Bill, Mary, and Tom loves his wife Mary, but Mary secretly loves Tom.  Unfortunately for Mary, however, Tom loves everybody.  Or nobody.  Or only himself.  Or maybe he has finally met his match.  In a poignant scene he sits on stage and sings--a song written and performed by actor Keith Carradine which won Carradine an Oscar--as four different women sit in the audience, each in her own private moment, each thinking he is singing specifically to her.  He is in fact singing to one of them, the one least likely, and she finally succumbs to his long-term efforts, only to be unaffected by his efforts later to make her jealous.  She is too practical.  She has too many responsibilities at home to let him break her heart.

There are two women on the outside looking in.  Sueleen Gay (Gwen Welles) and Albequerque (Barbara Harris) have both come to Nashville to try to make it--the latter with her husband Star hilariously chasing her.  One of them cannot sing a note to save her life, and her steadfast delusion provides the film with some of its greatest heartache.  The other sings beautifully and powerfully, and in a brilliant turn, after spending the entire film struggling against all odds and without any promise, is thrust into the spotlight through a series of circumstances, providing the film with its payoff twist.

Keenan Wynn, son of the legendary Ed Wynn and himself a star of the 1940s, powerfully plays the sympathetic Mr. Green.  He lovingly cares for his wife Esther, who is in the hospital down the hall from music star Barbara Jean, and he perpetually tries to get his niece Martha ("L.A. Joan", played by Shelley Duvall) to come see her.  He rents a room in his home to fiddle drifter Kenny Fraiser (David Hayward), and that decision might just turn out to be a mistake.

Lily Tomlin plays Linnea Reese, the wife of music manager Delbert "Del" Reese, played by Ned Beatty.  Here you have two top actors playing together.  Beautiful.  I had the most wonderful pleasure of seeing Lily Tomlin live at the Ahmanson in her one-woman performance of The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, and it was one of the most outstanding performances I have seen.  For the length of the show she kept the audience enthralled with a dozen or more characters using nothing on stage but her own body, morphing effortlessly from one character to the next.  Unfortunately here, she plays the lead singer of a black gospel choir and she looks uncomfortable and out of place.  On the DVD commentary, Altman admits that she informed him ahead of time that she was not ready for that part of the role and that he did not give her the time to prepare.  Just get in there and do it.  The results are disappointing.  Here you have one of the female masters of physicality looking awkward and inauthentic.  She wins us back in spades, though, with her very sympathetic character, mature, maternal, raising two deaf children, trying to keep her marriage intact, negotiating with her own heart when it is placed under pressure, not giving in to emotion over duty.  And her physical genius returns when she signs with her children and sings with them the Joe Raposo Sesame Street song "Sing," made famous by The Carpenters.

Ned Beatty, meanwhile, is as fantastically layered as always.  I touched on him earlier this year when we watched Shock Corridor (1963), mentioning that his work in Superman (1978) was not indicative of his talent as an actor.  He is a major talent, and his work in Deliverance (1972) and Network (1976), for example, is tremendously powerful and nuanced.  (I was using him as an example to promote the talent of James Best, who has been pigeonholed for his role as Roscoe P. Coltrane in The Dukes of Hazard.  He showed a much greater depth and range in Shock Corridor.)

http://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/02/036-shock-corridor-1963-united-states.html

Speaking of which, Gailard Sartain has a role here, and he is another example of an actor much more talented than that for which he is most known.  Sartain became a star doing sketch comedy for twenty years on the television variety show Hee Haw, but one look at his resume will demonstrate how much more he had in him.  Consider this list of accomplishments: The Buddy Holly Story (1978), Carl Reiner's The Jerk (1979), Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders (1983), Carl Reiner's All of Me (1984) (with Lily Tomlin!), Jim McBride's The Big Easy (1986) with Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin (and Ned Beatty!), Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning (1988), Ron Shelton's Blaze (1989), Stephen Frears' The Grifters (1990), Irwin Winkler's Guilty By Suspicion (1991), Jon Avnet's Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Alan Rudolph's Equinox (1992), Lee David Zlotoff's lovely film The Spitfire Grill (1996), Michael Mann's Ali, starring Will Smith (2001), and Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown (2005).  And that is not half his resume.

Musician Steve Earle is an extra in this movie!

Actors love to work with directors like Robert Altman.  They have so many tools at their disposal which other directors often overlook.  But Altman understands that film is a collaborative effort, and he gives his fellow workers room to work.  How wonderful it would have been to have been a part of his team.  It is no wonder that so many of his actors came back to him time and time again.

So despite the lack of verisimilitude, the film itself is a wonderful, sprawling, intoxicating journey into a world and through the lives of the people who inhabit that world.  Its greatest triumph is that the viewer cares about the characters and wishes he could spend more time with them.