I hope the few fans who hail this film as some kind of masterpiece don't hide behind the overused defense that because they are such a vocal minority in their praise of this film, the rest of us just don't get it. Indeed, Altman introduced a new method for executing multi-character storytelling with his slice-of-life stories centered around one weekend in a country music festival, but the film is so dense with characters it's hard to invest emotions in anybody, given none of them are allowed to stretch out on screen for as long as we'd like them to. The performances are all-around great, even though some of these actors are not given much to do in the first place. Jeff Goldblum's tricycle/magician, as well as the young singing couple, exist nothing more than for window dressing. Keith Carradine does well with an underwritten but compelling role as a womanizing rock singer (his performance of the folkish "I'm Easy" is outstanding and worth seeing the film for alone ). Ronee Blakley, Gwen Welles and Lily Tomlin give great performances as singers who are all suffering for one reason or another, and Henry Gibson is terrific as country legend Haven Hamilton, portraying the typical southern gentleman - flag-waving, repressed, conservative, and bitchy.
My complaint of this film is how bland it's appearance and pace is. For all it's grand splendor of a country music festival, this film is stamped hard with tepid cinematography, Scorsese's dirty underworld of "Taxi Driver" looks more appealing than the "wide-open" heartland Altman is supposedly including us in on. Everything is this film looks and feels so tiring! It's almost surprising that for all of Altman's cross-cutting editing, the film borders on boring at many times. As for its dramatic climax, I'm sure Altman was considered prophetic by the mid 80's when the efforts of Mark David Chapman and John Hinkley came to fruition, but by today's standards the finale resembles the (average) evening news, and therefore dates the film horribly. Like many 70's movies, the film has a slow, deliberate pace which hinders its ability to expound on some two dozen characters. It's possible another hour of storytelling would have cleared that up; but sitting through 2-and-a-half hours of "Nashville" already required a considerable digestion of cigarettes and soda on my part, and I wouldn't want to examine what Altman would have done were it any longer. Although many of you Altman lovers may gripe at hearing this, when I want to watch a "mosaic" storytelling type of movie, I'll stick with P.T. Anderson. I'll take disco & funk or Aimee Mann over country music any day.
My complaint of this film is how bland it's appearance and pace is. For all it's grand splendor of a country music festival, this film is stamped hard with tepid cinematography, Scorsese's dirty underworld of "Taxi Driver" looks more appealing than the "wide-open" heartland Altman is supposedly including us in on. Everything is this film looks and feels so tiring! It's almost surprising that for all of Altman's cross-cutting editing, the film borders on boring at many times. As for its dramatic climax, I'm sure Altman was considered prophetic by the mid 80's when the efforts of Mark David Chapman and John Hinkley came to fruition, but by today's standards the finale resembles the (average) evening news, and therefore dates the film horribly. Like many 70's movies, the film has a slow, deliberate pace which hinders its ability to expound on some two dozen characters. It's possible another hour of storytelling would have cleared that up; but sitting through 2-and-a-half hours of "Nashville" already required a considerable digestion of cigarettes and soda on my part, and I wouldn't want to examine what Altman would have done were it any longer. Although many of you Altman lovers may gripe at hearing this, when I want to watch a "mosaic" storytelling type of movie, I'll stick with P.T. Anderson. I'll take disco & funk or Aimee Mann over country music any day.