Altman's Bicentennial Happening
FENTRESS, CALVIN
On Screen ALTMAN'S BICENTENNIAL HAPPENING BY CALVIN FENTRESS Throw away the muskets and the powdered wigs. Send back the Jefferson T-shirts. No 1776 edition of Time need apply. For until...
...His is at once a sweeping and intimate view, one that at his panoramic best David Lean probably never could capture...
...Geraldine Chaplin, playing a BBC commentator who comments interminably on the Nashville-American scene, is a disaster...
...For until something better comes along, we have found our bicentennial happening-a 160-minute extravaganza called Nashville that has been given to us by producer-director Robert Altman...
...Hal Phillip Walker is too efficient by half, but then he isn't demonstrably human...
...It is a sad comment on American tastes that this musical product should be so well-received...
...At the Grand Ole Opry, the audience dutifully claps when it is signaled to clap...
...Altman recognizes and often lances our hypocrisies, our vanities, our foolishness, our darker sides...
...Two and a half hours of Americana later, wonderful Barbara Harris casually surveys the calamity around her, takes the mike, and with a gathering, dramatic force sings over and over again, "You may say, that I ain't free, but it don't worry me...
...Unless one is a lawyer, I suppose both of these ideas has its appeal...
...Inside a studio recording booth, his hard eyes scanning a dimly lit audience of hangers-on, Haven Hamilton sings about his country...
...Our rites: Ronee Blakley is recovering from "a terrible accident involving a fire baton.' Our tolerance: "You get your hair cut," Gibson angrily tells his piano player...
...Her unnecessarily grating performance succeeds only in drawing attention to itself, even as everyone around her is blending into the human landscape...
...full of self-righteousness and self-pity...
...so much of us is here...
...Easy riders, black choirs, diners, soldiers, lawyers, Nixon, docs, cops, kids, clowns, boats, beer, busin', pile-ups, pickups, crack-ups, screw-ups, American Airlines, American flags, Confederate flags, TV, JFK, Howard K. Smith, Vietnam, Oswald, Watergate, stars, bars, braces, strippers, Shriners, show biz, zip codes, Right Guard, ads, fads, God, guns, cones, Cokes, candidates, Cadillacs, Kodaks, flacks, fiddles, freeways, funerals, fornication, fights, freaks, falsies, flirts, Harvard Law, the Tennessee Twirling Institute, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, for starters...
...For the sake of the children, we must say goodbye...
...After seeing and hearing Nashville, one must assume that Altman agrees...
...The role was poorly conceived to start with, and she makes it worse...
...I'm sorry, Mr...
...Following the assassination attempt in "the Athens of the South," the large attending crowds are neither angered nor shocked...
...Communally edited by Altman and his associates, it shows individuals briefly appearing, disappearing, then reappearing...
...We do not always win his respect...
...Altman is sometimes heavy-handed in his approach to public America and to the American public, although he films both so well that this proves only a minor distraction...
...The platform that has brought Walker so far so fast includes promises to change the National Anthem and to remove all lawyers from government...
...The location, Nashville, U.S.A...
...We must be doing something right," goes his patriotic refrain, "to last 200 years...
...Alas, it doesn't sing right...
...Thus, there are two Americas under examination in Nashville, one public, the other private...
...We, the star-struck people, are glad-handed, crowd-controlled and media-saturated into an audience of zombies by interchangeable performers and politicians-blackbelts all in the manipulative arts...
...Altman directs a bombardment at his audiences, yet many will hardly notice the blood until the house lights come up...
...But all of the performances, good and bad, benefit from consistently superior technical work...
...For one thing, it is blurred around the politics...
...Whether he or Tewkesbury devised the many loosely interlocking subplots, however, the director clearly is the person who makes those work...
...At the same time he draws on our energy, intelligence and creativity, our humor, optimism and love-and he revels in our diversity...
...He seems to me an ultimately affectionate satirist of our national and personal ways, although he sure does stick it to us: Our language...
...Nashville), Lily Tomlin (not your everyday housewife) and Ronee Blakley (a wounded butterfly and star of stars) are inspired casting surprises...
...Yet the quality of the songs is of secondary importance...
...Without roaming beyond his chosen Southern city, Altman brings the America of the '70s to the screen...
...Ronee Blakley's nervous breakdown on stage and subsequent retreat to the wings generates boos that are quickly quelled when a return performance is promised for the next day...
...He does not deal kindly with Americans en masse...
...If he is an admirer of country & western music, he surely could have found a way to present the best of it-or even the second best...
...Altman's needle is all the sharper because his film is so deadpan...
...Altman has given us character sketches here, not character studies, yet the sketches reveal a great deal about how he sees us one by one...
...We flicker to life only if there is a pause in the entertainment...
...Henry Gibson (Haven Hamilton -Mr...
...As they weave on and off the screen, what is gradually revealed about them is less the facts of their lives than the textures...
...Nashville is a mesh of two dozen criss-crossing lives, all heading toward one fateful moment together in the sun...
...instead, they hold up still higher their freshly-scrubbed small children-no need for the coming generation to miss the next act...
...The redneck music is very popular right now," says a political packager, trying to explain "this Southern thing...
...It is a considerable artistic achievement, unquestionably one of the richest films in recent memory...
...With nothing other than the whiny numbers throughout Nashville to go on, anyone would have to concede that Kenton was surely on to something...
...Henry Gibson playing a country star is unbelievably good...
...Barbara Harris as a runaway wife hanging around for her big break with awesome single-mindedness...
...Altman's restless cameras probe, pan, circle, cut in and out...
...Altman is known for allowing his actors considerable rein, and the mix of direction and improvisation that went into Nashville produces characters verite...
...From the opening star-spangled credits to the all-American assassination at the end, Nashville is washed in countless hues of red, white and blue...
...Defensive optimism perhaps, but in each case the music's message is similar: It's a good ol' country...
...Be it political, musical or homicidal, the show must go on...
...Not often have this many major characters been spliced together as skillfully as they are here...
...The rally is held, there is an assassination attempt, the film ends...
...Over the course of five days, his agents successfully enlist the country & western stars of "Opryland" for an outdoor rally that could have a decisive effect on the balloting...
...The time is a Presidential election year, probably 1976...
...Unfortunately, the probable President-to-be is off key in a movie that otherwise mainly sounds and looks accurate...
...So much of the way we are and the way we live...
...Indeed, what shines through almost every frame of Nashville is the striking individuality of people away from the crowd...
...If for altman, the great American audience is a bust-much too close to comatose for comfort-his countrymen as separate human beings rest gentler on his mind...
...Along with this visual feast comes a sound track equally vibrant, equally true...
...True, even away from the stage managed mob, there is plenty of personal manipulation...
...In Nashville, humorless passivity is the hallmark of Americans together...
...No one save Chaplin hams it up...
...Given the generally high level of Nashville, though, the entire candidacy of Hal Phillip Walker should have been better thought through for greater impact...
...Michael Murphy as a Jeb Magruder...
...Tightly knotted narrative threads are neither Altman's interest nor his forte...
...The music in the movie is close to nonstop, and while it is never excessive in the context of the film, it isn't very good either...
...Green expired this morning...
...What does it all mean...
...Keith Carradine as a rock star who gets a lot but can't get enough...
...Most of the figures populate-or infiltrate-the top-dollar world of the country-music industry...
...See Bruce Cook's "Patronizing the Nashville Sound," NL, July 21...
...And of course our music: "I can't leave my wife," twangs Hamilton, "there's three reasons why- there's Jimmy, there's Cathy, there's sweet Loreli...
...For all of Alt-man's darts, I came away from Nashville feeling I had been to a celebration of American life, not to target practice...
...Talk about your silent majorities...
...Actually, so many people turn in outstanding performances that this has to be more than coincidence...
...Most of the barbed lines are throwaways, and, like the barbed images, they go by very fast...
...for another, its music is mediocre...
...But behind the scenes and the masks of Opryland, things are much more human and consequently much less efficient...
...You don't belong in Nashville...
...Hal Phillip Walker is a populist who hides from the people, but they vote for him anyway because he comes in such a slick, easy package...
...Green, but Mrs...
...it is a film about the country...
...itself...
...Cecil B. DeMille used to produce spectacles of the spectacular...
...Whether it's the murmur of secret lovers, the rhythms of a city, or Tennessee small talk, Nashville sounds right...
...Robert Altman may well agree...
...Our stars: Gibson introduces Karen Black to the Grand Ole Opry audience as having gotten "out of the dentist's chair just this morning where she was having some root canal work...
...Our sexual folkways: An amateur stripper tosses her appreciatively oinking audience the sweat socks that she has stuffed into her bra...
...Allen Garfield as a star's manager-husband ("Don't tell me how to run your life")-all are good, and several others are, too...
...Karen Black as a ripe second banana...
...When they move away from the common herd and start to become the stars of their own lives, he presents them as complex, interesting and sympathetic...
...Nonetheless, for our shared and separate loneliness, fear and pain-for our humanity- we appear to have earned his compassion...
...Whenever and wherever he brings us together -at a concert, a rally, a stag smoker, the ballot box-we are distinguished primarily by our collective mindlessness...
...In Altman movies, the lines of creativity are difficult to separate (Altman calls film "the collaborative art"), but presumably he and screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury must share responsibility for the skimpiness of Nashville's political content...
...it is our national pacifier, and the more simple-minded the better...
...The opening song in Nashville is performed by (and, incidentally, was written by) Henry Gibson...
...This is not a film about country music...
...A previous unknown, Hal Phillip Walker, running as the candidate for the Replacement party, is in Tennessee seeking his fourth straight primary win...
...trying to sing like one, he is just unbelievable...
...Stan Kenton recently declared that "the so-called music" coming out of Nashville is "a national disgrace, probably the lowest level of contemporary music...
...The screen spills over with an assortment of memorable images of people acting like people amid details as familiar as home...
...Still, the movie remains a standout on at least two counts: It memorably mirrors some significant truths about America and Americans as we enter our 200th year, and it takes wonderfully full advantage of film as the most versatile of all the art forms...
...What of it...
...Employing the idiom of a single industry in a single city, Altman and his cohorts have managed to provide a truly national view...
...He nearly puts it all together: several persuasive performances, a searching camera that doesn't get in the way, a sound track that says everything, living color NBC hasn't dreamed of, a razzmatazz windup, wit, pathos, sensitivity . . The directing is extraordinary, and Alt-man well deserves the awards he is sure to garner for this, his eighth film in the last six years...
...But what he, Joan Tewkesbury and an exceptional cast have done best is to successfully create private moments in private lives as vital and varied as the U.S...
...Robert Altman has produced here a spectacular of the ordinary...
...But Nashville is not without serious flaws...
...and thanks to a nearly complete set of fresh, high-quality performances, these are quite enough...
...Ned Beatty is perfect in the role of Tomlin's wheelin' dealin' down-home husband...
...Whatever it was that Altman and Tewkesbury were attempting with this character, Chaplin's incredibly stupid lines and mannerisms obscure it...
...In the case of Nashville this enables him to overcome the picture's major shortcoming, the weakness of the political story that is the central plot...
...With one glaring exception...
Vol. 58 • August 1975 • No. 16
