Their Town

Robert Altman’s Nashville is perhaps the most encompassing and revealing film ever made about what it is that defines this nation, this people, this age. It takes us to Nashville for five days, with the soothing advance man for an unseen politician pursuing the Presidency as candidate of the mysterious “Replacement Party,” whose slogan is “new roots for the nation”; we are also with stars and would-be stars of the Grand Old Opry in that small city which calls itself the Athens of the South. The characters’ disparate paths cross repeatedly until they finally converge for the stunning, fatal climax at Nashville’s imitation Parthenon, where the political campaigners and Opry greats and aspirants come one afternoon for a rally.

Though set in one heartland town— a lead character at a crucial point shouts: “This isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville!”—the movie expands to become an incisive commentary on the whole of America. It is encyclopedic in scope, offering dazzling insights into patriotism, greed, sex, love, loneliness, commerce, ambition, fear, criminality, even nobility. It will enrage people who can think nothing but good (or ill) of this nation. For instance, the film takes patriotism seriously, offering some “middle Americans” as perfectly decent folk; simultaneously, it brutally savages mindless flag-waving chauvinism. One telling scene shows the king of Nashville singers, a runty fellow all gussied up in his red wig and over-tight cowboy suit, singing an absurd Bicentennial ditty about how America “must be doing something right—to last 200 years.” The sentiment is at once perfectly valid and outlandishly parodied. The film’s aim will seem to one viewer a massive putdown of America; to another it will appear to celebrate the plain American values. It does both. It is the greatness, the meanness, the sheer expanse and undigestibility of this country in this day.

DB

About the Author

David Brudnoy

Robert Altman’s Nashville is perhaps the most encompassing and revealing film ever made about what it is that defines this nation, this people, this age. It takes us to Nashville for five days, with the soothing advance man for an unseen politician pursuing the Presidency as candidate of the mysterious “Replacement Party,” whose slogan is “new roots for the nation”; we are also with stars and would-be stars of the Grand Old Opry in that small city which calls itself the Athens of the South. The characters’ disparate paths cross repeatedly until they finally converge for the stunning, fatal climax at Nashville’s imitation Parthenon, where the political campaigners and Opry greats and aspirants come one afternoon for a rally.

Though set in one heartland town— a lead character at a crucial point shouts: “This isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville!”—the movie expands to become an incisive commentary on the whole of America. It is encyclopedic in scope, offering dazzling insights into patriotism, greed, sex, love, loneliness, commerce, ambition, fear, criminality, even nobility. It will enrage people who can think nothing but good (or ill) of this nation. For instance, the film takes patriotism seriously, offering some “middle Americans” as perfectly decent folk; simultaneously, it brutally savages mindless flag-waving chauvinism. One telling scene shows the king of Nashville singers, a runty fellow all gussied up in his red wig and over-tight cowboy suit, singing an absurd Bicentennial ditty about how America “must be doing something right—to last 200 years.” The sentiment is at once perfectly valid and outlandishly parodied. The film’s aim will seem to one viewer a massive putdown of America; to another it will appear to celebrate the plain American values. It does both. It is the greatness, the meanness, the sheer expanse and undigestibility of this country in this day.