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DVD Tuesdays: Nashville — It's Not Just About Music
I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.
As I was watching Bobby last week (a movie that, by the way, I like rather better than most reviewers, its reach outstrips its grasp, but isn't ambition a good thing?) I couldn't keep my mind off Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), a model for successful multistrand narratives. It's one of my favorite films ever; I saw it when it opened at a now-vanished theater called the Baronet, I showed it regularly during the five years I taught film history/theory/criticism, and after all those viewings it retains the power to chill me with its distillation of the heart-wrenching gulf between ideals and actions, between dreams and the grubby day-to-day reality of making it from sunrise to sunset without drowning in the troubles of the world.
I know what you're thinking: You don't really like country music. Doesn't matter. I don't either — Nashville isn't about country music. Regularly cited as one of the most influential films of the '70s, it's been characterized as the quintessential portrait of post-Vietnam War/Watergate America, but the reason it remains so bitterly relevant is that its underlying concern is the way pop culture smoothes and shapes vivid, inchoate longings into tidy manageable tropes, and the cost of surrender to those prefabricated dreams.
Altman juggles 24 characters, ranging from old-school country stars like Henry Gibson's Haven Hamilton and steel magnolia Connie White (B-movie regular Karen Black) to country-pop crossover artist Tom Frank (Keith Carradine), bedraggled housewife Winifred (Barbara Harris), who's abandoned her husband in search of stardom, L.A. groupie Joan (Shelley Duvall), and sundry hangers-on. Their stories play out against the grassroots presidential campaign of independent candidate Hal Phillip Walker, whose team is trying to entice fragile C&W legend Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), who's barely recovered from one nervous breakdown and well on her way to another, to do a concert on his behalf. Altman's cast not only sing — some extremely well, including Black and Carradine, whose "I'm Easy" became a bona fide hit — but also wrote their own material, with an assist from music supervisor Richard Baskin. Altman is the master of the multithread narrative, but Nashville was lightning in a bottle: He's never matched, let alone topped, it. I couldn't help but see 2006's A Prairie Home Companion as Nashville's pale shadow, and Meryl Streep's character, iron butterfly Yolanda Johnson, as a less tragically vulnerable Barbara Jean.
The notion of destiny vs happenstance underlies all multithread narratives, from Grand Hotel (1932) to last year's surprise Oscar-winner, Crash. Is everything that happens to us part of a larger design? Or is it as Shakespeare writes in King Lear: "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport."
One critic suggested that the fact that Nashville's actors were able to write creditable C&W songs was evidence that country music is reductive and formulaic. Yes or no?
Nashville explores the intersection of entertainment and politics. Are people more sophisticated about that relationship than they used to be?
Altman is famous for his use of overlapping dialogue. Does having actors talk over one another actually duplicate the ebb and flow of real-life conversation, or is it just another form of stylization?
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Nov 20, 2006 5:27 PM
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I just found that Robert Altman died today at 81. I first was familar with his work when I saw Popeye in first run in 1980. Pretty amusing, although it did not do the animated cartoons justice. Later in the decade, I saw M*A*S*H* and I couldn't believe how different and more raunchy it was from the TV series. The Frank and Hot Lips (which is where Margaret's nick name came from) sexual encounter being seen by everyone was especially a highlight. The last one I saw was Gosford Park, a nice if a bit slow Altman pic that got a great performance from Maggie Smith. I also saw his first film The Delinquints, a compelling drama about rebellion with a good performance from Tom "Billy Jack" Laughlin. So long, Mr. Altman. May your spirit live on in future independent filmakers...
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Nov 21, 2006 1:18 PM
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Overlapping dialog is a stylistic choice. People rarely do that in real life, mostly because it makes it so difficult to hear what someone else is saying while formulating your own impending thoughts and speaking your previous ones. So hearing what the other person said and being able to respond to it in some rapid-fire, pithy manner is almost impossible.
But I wouldn't want to live in a world without His Girl Friday!
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Nov 21, 2006 1:27 PM
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I also just learned of Robert Altman's death -- I find it eerie that it coincided with this column.
In any event, I just wrote a brief consideration of his career for the news area of the site, should anyone care to read it.
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Nov 21, 2006 1:34 PM
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One critic suggested that the fact that Nashville's actors were able to write creditable C&W songs was evidence that country music is reductive and formulaic. Yes or no?
As a musician and a music critic I'd have to say that music in and of itself is formulaic by it's mathmatical nature. We are just lucky that math allows for infinite combinations and possibilities and that music may be unique among mathmatical pursuits in its ability to move us emotionally.
The notion that Country music is reductive is interesting. I am fairly sure that the critic you cited meant that as an indictment of country music.
Even if that assessment is accurate I don't think it is any less true of any popular music and perhaps any music in general. And I don't think it's neccessarily bad.
To completely and exactly put across one's feelings about God, love, life
and the other things that inspire music and other creative arts would be exhaustive and interminable-save by death. I guess maybe Proust tried to do it but I haven't made it through his opus.
It is neccessary to be reductive in order to fit most feelings, experiences etc. within the confines of a song or a musical work. When Bach wrote Jesu: Joy Of Man's Desiring he had to reduce his feelings about religion into a mutable and understandable form. No less so than Van Morrison did when he encapsulated his intense passion for his lover by saying "she makes me feel so good, she makes me feel allright" and becomes so overcome with emotion that he can only get his real feelings across by repeatedly spelling and shouting her name-"G-L-O-R-I-A".
The hit status of "I'm Easy" aside, the "country" music of Nashville was successful as "movie" country music but not as actual country muisic. The success of "I'm Easy" is more reflective of Keith Carradine's skills as a songwriter and musiciian (I think he had some experience as such prior to or cincurrent with his acting career as did his brother David) than of how "easy" it is to write country song.
None of the rest of the songs in Nashville are nearly as memorable as "Easy" and serve more as a chorus to provide momentum for the plot than as songs which have any reall merit on their own. None of the other cast members had even as successful a music career as did Carradine. Ronee Blakely made some efforts at one but never made much of an impact on the music scene. The highlight of her post-Nashville music career was working for a brief time as a background singer for Bob Dylan. She may even have gotten that gig through her friendship with Dylan or his circle and his interest in the film business. Dylan's Renaldo And Clara may have been influenced by Nashville (only Bob can say for sure) and was released just three years after that film.
The country music of Nashville was, I think, no more reflective of real country music than the music of Grease was reflective of the Rock and Roll music of the 1950's much of which was highly superior to that of the film. In both movies the execution and overall "sound" of the music was much different from the music it was designed to represent. Even as good a song as "I'm Easy" owed more to the music of the newer (at the time) country/rock country/folk artists (Kenny Loggins comes first to mind) who were beginning to become popular in the late-sixties and early seventies than to the far better music of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash etc.
As I would not define the music of Grease as true rock and roll I would not define the country music of Nashville as true country. Unfortunately the junk that passes for country on today's radio airwaves has become more like the music of Nashville than Nashville was like the country music of its or a previous time.
Country music can be as intelligent (Rodney Crowell, Roseanne Cash) as innovative (Steve Earle, Johnny Cash) and as beautifully moving ("I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", "Silver Wings") as any other type of popular music depending on who is making it. It can also be as trite and inconsequential (Shania Twain, Sugarland) as the worst pop music. With artists like Twain it can also be defined as country even though it bears almost no resemblance to what has been traditionally defined as such.
I think the music in Nashville was another of the many characters the film was wrapped around. I would not acclaim the music of Nashville as successful or even good country music though I would say just the opposite of it as movie music.
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Nov 28, 2006 3:03 AM
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DaMess -- this is a really thought provoking post. I think the real essence of country music is its ability to bypass the intellectual for the visceral: Hank Williams' Travellin' Man sends shivers up my spine, and not just because I associate it with Dust Devil, one of the great unsung genre films of the 1990s. And both Jesu: Joy Of Man's Desiring and Nashville's My Idaho Home can reduce me to tears because they speak to some powerful, inchoate longing that defies rational analysis. Both appeal to the desire to believe in something better than the day-to-day grind: To me that's the power of music and dance (I spent a significant chunk of my life working for New York City Ballet): They blow past the verbal and appeal to a primordial yearning to transcend the flesh and aspire to something less earthbound.
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Dec 2, 2006 10:35 PM
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Yes yes yes. Yearning! That's one of the primary (and primal) feelings that music can release. In popular music country and blues seem to do it extremely well. It's why Hank Williams (and Johnny Cash) and Robert Johnson seem to touch so many people who don't spend much time listening to to other artists in their respective genres. Funny you should mention dance. It can happen there too.
Several years ago, trying to impress a former girlfriend (I was about 20 or so I guess) I took her to see Rudolph Nureyev. AT the time I didn't know or care much about ballet (although I did have a secret envy of people who could dance) but the combination of the reason mentioned above and the opportunity to see someone who was practically the embodiment of his art form compelled me to go.
Nureyev was scheduled to dance the third and final dance. When the second performance came on a guy came out and did things that were awe-inspiring. He made incredible un-human leaps- pausing in mid-air long enough to to light a cigarette or make a phone call before deciding, with complete disregard for trivial forces like gravity, to come down. I knew nothing about ballet but I could not believe what I was seeing. I turned to my date and said something along the lines of, "Geez, Nureyev has to be really something to follow this guy. He's unbelievable".
Of course she looked at me like the bonehead I was and explained that the order of the program had been changed and that we were indeed watching Nureyev.
When someone can impress you so much doing something you have no experience with and no personal criteria to use as a measure is, I think, one of the true marks of greatness. Hank Williams and Robert Johnson have done it. Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan did it and I think Shakespeare and of course, Bach, continue to do it. All can evoke feelings that are beyond mere admiration.
And "inchoate" is a great word to apply to the way music does it. I had my heart broken by certain songs long before I ever fell in love or experienced great loss. I can remember (and these may seem like trite examples) being almost reduced to tears listening to Moon River or Theme From A Sumnmer Place or Cathy's Clown or The Tracks Of My Tears when I was still in elementary school. These many decades on I can still barely listen to "Place" without getting misty-eyed. It's every summer romance at the family vacation spot, every last week of summer vacation, every memory of every friend who didn't come back to school the next semester and every solitary walk where you saw something that was so beautiful that you ached to have someone with you to see it because the responsibility of witness was almost too much to bear.
And Jesu: Joy Of Man's Desiring!
It's exquisite beyond words. How can one be touched so deeply and in the way it seems the composer intended by a song that doesn't even have words? Yet like Summer Place it exactly conveys/evokes/provokes/engenders what Steiner meant it to.
I guess great art just does that. I never understood why anyone ever had to own a painting until I saw the work of Edward Hopper. In particular one called "Office At Night". There is the truly erotic nature of the painting-the way her skirt fits around her hips and the fact that this is the point on the line where his surreptitious glances would fall-and the fact judging by her less covert look at him, that she is neither unaware nor unwelcoming of the attention. And there is the implied story of how they came to be there-are they involved in an unspoken never to be consummate love because he or she is married? Involved elsewhere or not are they just too shy and blocked by the conventions and mores of their time to act on their feelings? Is he completely blind to her desires and/or in denial about his? Or are they just waiting for the last co-worker to leave before they tear each others clothes off?
But the truly great thing about the painting is that I could be completely wrong. The painting may about something totally different from my interpretation. And isn't that maybe even more wonderful?
I know that Hopper is considered by some to be too "accessible" to be truly great but as they say " I may not know art but...". When I saw that painting and one or two others I knew why someone could feel they had to possess a painting, to have to be able to look at it every day and at any time, to live inside of it. It was a combination of the way I suppose Humbert Humbert and Pygmalion must have felt.
Hopper says you (should) "paint a thing at the point at which you live it best". What a great way to describe how I'd like to think that some of my favorite artists/writers/composers work as opposed to the ones who are merely clever and skilled. Like, say, Vermeer, of whom Hopper's light is so reminiscent and who affects me much the same way, instead of Picasso(although I do not for a moment dismiss or feel qualified to dismiss Picasso's soul. Perhaps better to say 'instead of the way Picasso became or could be'). Or Astaire and the Nicholas Brothers instead of Michael Flatley. Or Willie Mays instead of Barry Bonds and Mark Magwire.
All subjective assessments of course and you might have different examples and that only on the chance that I've accurately conveyed and that you gree with my point. And even so I'm sure that there are worker bee genes in the greats and some technicians can achieve greatness even through or just because of their cleverness and ability to persevere and produce.
But I've always felt that we surrender to the music, books, films, etc. that truly move us. The thought of doing so to a work or creator who is unworthy is repugnant and saddening-"unworthy" not, of course, being the same as
"flawed". I think maybe insincerity is the one unforgivable failing in a creative artist. I mean, we want the magician to believe in magic don't we? Or at least in the magic of magic.
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Dec 4, 2006 3:56 AM
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