Nashville (1975)

(Kanopy Streaming, September 2020) I don’t think I’ll ever love a movie from writer-director Robert Altman (well, maybe The Player), but I can certainly admire a few of them, like Nashville. Of course, Nashville is The Big One for Altman—the one most often referred to as the purest incarnation of his themes and methods, the one selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry, the one with perhaps the biggest scope and cast. It follows no less than 24 characters over five days in Nashville, in between many music performances and one political convention. Equally fascinated with music and politics, Nashville is a messy, unclean film: everything is improvised, everyone has shaggy hair, everywhere you look shows America at its most 1970s. (There’s a very real time-capsule element to this film.) This is Altman at his most Altmanesque, with overlapping dialogue, accidental cinematography, improvised narrative, grainy images and a mixture of artistic and political. It’s not, at 160 minutes, a breezy watch: the need to keep track of who’s everyone and what they’re doing can give brain cells a workout by itself. It’s not, to be blunt, my kind of film: I like cinema to be tight, focused, overengineered and deliberate. But as a demonstration of what’s possible at the antithesis of what I like, Nashville is eloquent enough. Not easy to like, but easy to respect.