In 1975, just months before the celebration of the American bicentennial, Robert Altman released his film Nashville. At the time, it was taken as a provocative statement about this country. And according to film students who recently viewed it at the University of Colorado Denver, this 49-year-old movie still holds its power.
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Robert Altman was a star director in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s. He directed M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Player, films with complicated stories and many characters. But his masterpiece is the 1975 Nashville, with 24 major characters roaming in and around the country music capitol of the world, all of them grabbing at the hope of fame and fortune in music. The story is tied together by a populist presidential candidate who is never seen, only heard, through a white van roaming the city with speakers on the roof playing what seems like a never-ending, sometimes snide speech about what’s wrong with this country.
Altman made Nashville for the 200th birthday of America, and like most of his work, it’s deeply cynical. His characters exploit anyone and anything, and they’re loaded with hypocrisy. Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), dressed throughout in fancy white spangled cowboy duds, sings his gooey patriotism. He preens through the film like a rooster.
The candidate's agent organizes a fundraiser, which turns out to be a strip show for crass white businessmen, with a tone-deaf wannabe singer (Gwen Welles) who doesn’t know she’s supposed to strip.
Keith Carradine plays a bad boy singer who sleeps with nearly every woman in the cast, and phones the next one even before his bedmate of the moment leaves his hotel room. All 24 characters will show up at the end of the film for the candidate’s outdoor concert.
Nashville comes at a high point for American film—between about 1965 and 1975—with such movies as Bonnie and Clyde, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Godfather. Many films of the time were smart, nuanced and complex. These were mainstream films, and, unlike current pop movies, had depth and ambiguity. They didn’t tell the audience what they meant. Viewers had to pay attention to catch the subtleties. Adult human beings talked about these films; newspapers and magazines wrote urgent articles about them. Look up the great critic Pauline Kael’s essay on Nashville.
But does Nashville matter now? Does the 49-year-old movie speak to our politics, our dilemmas about America? When I showed the movie to my film history students, I pushed them to talk about how it affected them. Right after the screening, most of them looked like they’d been hit by a bus—pretty much the same reaction many 20-somethings had to the film in 1975. They’d never seen a movie with such raucous energy, one that left them wondering what had hit them so hard from so many directions, and was also so terrifically entertaining – and all without explosions.
A week later, my students had sorted out their reactions. They said that while the details have changed, Nashville does speak to us now. Nashville is about greed, aggressive ambition, self-serving characters and opportunistic politics – and all of these characterize present-day America.
They also pointed out that this film, while so critical of America, is also patriotic. The huge American flag that billows over the entire screen near the end cuts two ways – it’s both sarcastic and hopeful – and the film gives a powerful image of this unruly country.
After a terrible moment, Nashville ends with a bedraggled woman picking up the mike at the concert and leading a song with the ambiguous, disturbing refrain, “You may say that I ain’t free/But it don’t worry me.”
Nashville is available online through streaming services or for free at the Internet Archive.
