A mile wide and an inch deep, "Nashville" is an overpopulated and overlong mess of a film that adds up to nothing. The cast is large, far too large for us to ultimately know any of the characters in any real depth. And when we do see them, they're playing out banal, under dramatized situations where there is nothing at stake and nothing changes. Stuff just happens, and we move on. Everything is given equal (which is to say no) weight. There's no connective tissue and no sense that any of this has any point. Pacing is further undermined with unnecessarily long musical numbers, which may please country music fans but will leave other audience members wondering where this is all going.
The film fails to convey the information we need to understand what is going on. Characters are introduced, but crucial information is simply omitted. Who are they? What is their relationship to the other characters they are interacting with? What is important to them and what is at stake? One shouldn't have to run to Wikipedia or watch the film five times to figure out what is going on.
Altman goes for quantity over quality, giving us a large cast of characters that we check in for 90 seconds before moving on. Several female characters look and sound very similar, it's virtually impossible to tell them apart. (The cinematography is almost entirely in far away masters, which only exacerbates the problem.) Henry Gibson more or less anchors the ensemble cast, although he seems like a bizarre choice for this role. Honestly, there wasn't anyone else who might have wanted to play this character?
At the end, the film attempts to provide the story with a sort of climax. But the moment plays out far too quickly and awkwardly. And the event evokes no fall out, reactions or repercussions of any kind. Typical.
The film fails to convey the information we need to understand what is going on. Characters are introduced, but crucial information is simply omitted. Who are they? What is their relationship to the other characters they are interacting with? What is important to them and what is at stake? One shouldn't have to run to Wikipedia or watch the film five times to figure out what is going on.
Altman goes for quantity over quality, giving us a large cast of characters that we check in for 90 seconds before moving on. Several female characters look and sound very similar, it's virtually impossible to tell them apart. (The cinematography is almost entirely in far away masters, which only exacerbates the problem.) Henry Gibson more or less anchors the ensemble cast, although he seems like a bizarre choice for this role. Honestly, there wasn't anyone else who might have wanted to play this character?
At the end, the film attempts to provide the story with a sort of climax. But the moment plays out far too quickly and awkwardly. And the event evokes no fall out, reactions or repercussions of any kind. Typical.