Along with screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury-whose own Altman-appointed trips to the city of Nashville served as inspiration for some of the film’s most memorable story beats-the two created a sprawling tapestry of a big city with a small town feel where characters would keep running into each other or simply cross paths only to surface again later on. Altman didn’t care about country music and he threw away the original idea for a more expanded approach to ensemble and sound design techniques he previous tested out in 1970’s MASH and 1974’s California Split. Altman latched on to the idea for the film because a movie studio wanted to make a film about country music-in a starring vehicle for Tom Jones, bizarrely enough-in order to sell some records. The music is the foundational framework of the movie, making itself obviously important from the standpoint of its Music City setting, but to hear of the making of the film it seems like something more akin to happenstance than substance. ![]() ![]() But the one movie that outright has it all is Nashville, Altman’s panoptically populist commentary about America and all its facets from religion, to culture, to celebrity, to politics, to music, and much more. There is the uncompromising domesticity of John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, the self-destructive composure of Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, the nascent American mythology of Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Days of Heaven, the anarchic political plunge of Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, and the pièce de résistance of the counterculture that is Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider. But the theme I personally veered towards most was their New American Cinema category, a group comprised of twenty-two films-so far-that in their words came as a “shock to the system” and consist of auteur-driven films “influenced by the foreign art cinema that was in vogue as well as the avant-garde and documentary techniques” of the mid-sixties into the seventies. It is a singular film from a singular director, and it has finally taken its rightful place in the Criterion Collection.Īmong the numerous things Criterion has done so well is distill certain movements or themes together, unofficially whittling its hundreds of titles down into clickable categories on its website like Amour Fou, French New Wave, Yakuza!, Cult Movies, or Classic Hollywood. ![]() Nashville is the type of movie that covers you like some sort of a cinematic blanket, never smothering you or your emotions but swaddling them enough in its grasp until it pulls itself knowingly away from you in its jarring grand finale. It’s a pure emotional high, and you don’t come down when the picture is over you take it with you.” As hyperbolic as that seems it’s an appropriately excessive statement for a fittingly excessive movie-that has twenty-four main characters and a nebulous-at-best plot, mind you-and one that I happen to pretty much agree with. What more is there to say about Robert Altman’s 1975 magnum opus Nashville? I mean really, it’s been held as a benchmark of not only 1970s cinema but American cinema as a whole since its release, and before the movie even came out it had critical luminaries like the one-and-only Pauline Kael throwing platitudes left and right at it from her review’s first paragraph with whoppers like “I’ve never before seen a movie I loved in quite this way: I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |