THE SCREEN:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
HEARD MELODIES
THE SCREEN
Early in Robert Altaian's Nashville there is a chain reaction freeway crash that is, except for an assassination at the end, the only time the film's twenty-four characters...
...The end of California Split seems, to one of the two gamblers in the film, an incomprehensible interruption of a streak of luck...
...HEARD MELODIES THE SCREEN Early in Robert Altaian's Nashville there is a chain reaction freeway crash that is, except for an assassination at the end, the only time the film's twenty-four characters all get together...
...While a young soldier is trying to listen to Barbara Jean sing, Mr...
...An interruption...
...One way or another, all the characters in Nashville have things backwards like this...
...colin l. westerbeck, jr.erbeck, jr...
...Even the songs of this so-called "Opry Land" seem to compete in a continuous game of Stop the Music...
...but it turns out to be the booth in another studio where a singer named Linnea Reese (Lily Tom-lin) is working, not the booth in Haven's studio...
...That boat, though only a momentary detail, suggests quite well what sort of movie Nashville is: the sort where water in a boat is a more likely occurrence than a boat in water...
...The last thing he intends Nashville to be is a documentary on the Nashville scene...
...Where M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, Images and California Split are each films organized around some central, controlling metaphor, Nashville simply is a metaphor...
...Altman cuts back and forth between these two clubs in such a way that we are sometimes unsure which drama we are reacting to...
...When Barbara Jean is felled by the assassin in the end, the woman who couldn't get a song in edgewise at the stock car race picks up the microphone and goes right on with the show...
...Green hears that his wife is dead too, the soldier comes up and starts talking about how his mother saved Barbara Jean's life...
...Miller, at times the visual language of Altman's films has seemed to be mumbling...
...Replacement" is what interruption becomes in this film, too: a permanent condition, a usurpation rather than a momentary distraction...
...When you look back a couple of years, Nashville seems to follow Altman's recent work as a logical (which is to say, screwball) development...
...And the night of the smoker, there's another drama being played out in another club across town, where Linnea has come for a rendezvous with a pop singer (Keith Carradine...
...For at least the last two or three films, interruption has been very much the style of the action in Altman's work...
...Green (Keenan Wynn) insists on talking about how his son died...
...The prison break in Thieves Like Us is interrupted by another conversation, an argument which causes one of the thieves to put another out of the getaway car in mid-escape...
...It's as if she were an expected stand-in rather than an interloper...
...Their lives are all transposed, up-ended, turned inside out...
...At a party given by Opry star Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), a journalist (Geraldine Chaplin) coaxes Haven's shy son into singing her his only song, but then she runs off to interview Elliott Gould before the song is over...
...Altman's films have always given the impression that he was trying to distill the metaphor out of his plots, to boil off pure images from ordinary reality...
...Yet in Nashville this style of action becomes something more than what it has been before...
...This is so partly because there are so many characters there can be no main plot line...
...After all, that's what a freeway crash really is, isn't it...
...Green's cry of anguish at his wife's death segues into the campaign manager's chuckle as he inspects the night club where the smoker is to be held...
...At a stock car race, another aspiring singer (Barbara Harris) has her performance completely drowned out by the roar of the engines...
...With Nashville, he perhaps succeeds...
...But in Nashville, this is no longer the case...
...From the film's first recording session, which Haven walks out on, to its closing concert, which is called on account of assassination, people and events butt in on each other all the time...
...In fact, the very form of the film is one which butts in on itself as Altman tries to keep track of his twenty-four characters...
...At a stag smoker run by a political campaign manager, the hooting of the audience finally silences the evening's entertainment, who was not told she's supposed to strip rather than sing...
...Basically, however, the life style of these characters is not so much neat reversal as haphazard interruption...
...And in the thick of this crash a boat being trailered by a car proves to be full of water, which it sloshes all over the highway...
...When Haven cues the control booth at the recording session for another take, Altman cuts to the booth...
...and since he feels himself to be dealing with a metaphor rather than a fact, there is no need to restrain his fantasies...
...Similarly, Mr...
...One of these plot lines deals with a presidential candidate very like George Wallace, a grass-roots candidate whose party is called the "Replacement" party...
...In this film, the action is interruption: interruption becomes the main event...
...Throughout the film people constantly walk out on each other, hang up on each other, and run into each other's cars...
...To Altman the place itself, Nashville, is in some vague, urgent way a metaphor for the whole country...
...The film has a good half-dozen plot lines that repeatedly overlap, obscure, intrude on and interrupt each other like the cars in that freeway accident...
...If Altman succeeds more completely than before, perhaps it is because he has 'been able to carry his ideas to such extremes...
...Everybody else's life seems to move that way-in reverse-too...
...At the beginning country-Western star Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley) is convalescing, and at the end, after her condition has deteriorated steadily for the film's whole two and a half hours, she is shot and wounded...
...The murder at the end of The Long Goodbye interrupts a conversation between the murderer and his victim...
...But later, just after Mr...
...In Brewster McCloud or Images, the disruption of reality with images seems a listless, even aimless effort...
...Like the dialogue in McCabe and Mrs...
...In the earlier films the action is forever being interrupted by something...
Vol. 102 • August 1975 • No. 12
