From the Heartland

By JAY COCKS

NASHVILLE

Directed by ROBERT ALTMAN Screenplay by JOAN TEWKESBURY

Nashville is the genuine article: a splendidly gifted film, vibrant and immediate, with moments of true greatness. Moments. If all goes well, the movie will survive the wild enthusiasm that has already been generated on its behalf.

The movie is a honky-tonk panorama of contemporary America and most of its obvious contradictions: a flagrant, nearly frenzied, workaday energy and a kind of moral deadness; a proud regard for history and heritage and an abiding need to construct a synthetic mythology; a sweeping national certitude and the hypocrisy that comes with it. Altman is fearless in his thematic ambitions for Nashville, and it is a good measure of his success that the movie is always fleet and supple, never top-heavy. The director and his talented collaborator Joan Tewkesbury (who also did the screenplay for Altman's excellent Thieves Like Us) find their major metaphor right at the heart of the country music scene and the people who create all those tunes about broken hearts and long lonesome roads. One suspects that what attracted Altman and Tewkesbury to C. & W. was both its audience ("These are the people who elect the President," a political advance man comments early in the film, with just a trace of disdain) and its tradition. Country-and-western basically dresses up folk music in rhinestones and spangles, making hay out of Americana. A lot of it is slick and sweet, and its sanctimony can curdle the blood. Altman used the music like a continuing, slap-happy dirge.

The movie satirizes country-and-western people--audience and performers alike--but without condescension and with a palpable affection for their fine, flaky spirit. Nashville stars two dozen actors, many of whom contributed their own songs, a touch that lends the film musical cohesion (and saves on expensive music rights). By themselves, most of the tunes--and most of the people who perform them--would not pass muster at the Grand Ole Opry. But the actors are skillful enough and their tunes either sprightly or funny enough to work around this point.

Defiant Apology. The one tune that occurs most frequently throughout the film and that indeed helps unify it is Keith Carradine's It Don't Worry Me with its chorus, "You may say that I ain't free/ But it don't worry me." Altman uses it as a lively anthem of indifference, a sing-along for deadheads. He weaves the song through the whole film and brings it full front at the climax, where a crowd sings it as a sort of chipper, even defiant apology after a singer has been shot down by a madman. "This isn't Dallas," shouts a performer from the stage. "It's Nashville." Of course, it is both. Altman means it to be even more. In this movie it is all of America.

Altman may have reached a little too far in this; but right now, in a time of congenial but often unambitious entertainments, it is good to have film makers who take that kind of risk. The intertwining narrative threads all have to do with music: people who make it or want to, people who listen to it and are moved by it, people whose lives are both distorted and enriched by it. There is no firm plot, only a lot of related incidents that enlarge and amplify each other. Relationships end and begin again, change deeply and remain the same. Whether it is a love affair, a business relationship or a fleeting allegiance, all the film's separate episodes seem to share a common theme of hollowness.

This can most clearly be seen in another recurring motif: the unlikely presidential campaign of Hal Phillip Walker. His platform expresses the shiniest, most insubstantial dreams of the country, and it capitalizes on the same sort of cozy, synthetic populism as country music. Walker wants to abolish oil subsidies and the electoral college, and even run all lawyers out of Government, "especially Congress." His appeal, like the music, is mostly emotional and a little treacherous. On a TV interview, Howard K. Smith informs us that Walker is "something of a mystery man" and first attracted college students to his cause with McKuenesque inquiries like "Does Christmas smell like oranges to you?" In Altman's tilted but pertinent fantasy, it makes perfect sense for Smith to add as an afterthought that indeed for him Christmas always has.

Real Assassins. Altman is at considerable pains not to take himself as seriously as perhaps he should. To this end, he installs a kind of international groupie, a BBC correspondent named Opal (energetically played by Geraldine Chaplin), at the very center of the action, and he has her mouth a great gush of pieties and platitudes about the U.S.: "It's America!" she says, beholding a collision on a highway; gun owners are "the real assassins," presumably because their influence can focus the madness of others toward homicide; a yard filled with auto wrecks is symbolic of the violent rape and waste of the whole country. Still, Altman is advancing these images seriously while Opal is commenting on them, and it is this kind of coyness--the eagerness both to use the rather parched symbolism and mock it too--that is the movie's most serious flaw.

The cast is large and almost uniformly excellent. One notices and most particularly appreciates Ronee Blakley and Karen Black as two of country music's leading attractions; Henry Gibson, wily and hilarious as Nashville's unofficial mayor, a purveyor of syrupy patriotism and fawning good will; Barbara Harris, splendid as a whacked-out kewpie who wants to be a big star; Dave Peel as Gibson's rather cowed son, looking like a crestfallen Arthur Godfrey; Michael Murphy as Walker's advance man; and David Hayward as the timid assassin.

Of all the reasons for which Nashville will be remembered, not the least significant is the movie debut of Lily Tomlin, extraordinary in the role of an upper-middle-class suburban wife who sings with a black gospel group. Anyone who knows Tomlin's particularly shrewd and quirky kind of comedy from television will not be surprised that her same skills come through here: intelligence, a dead-on perception of people that can be funny or rueful (or both at once), a uniquely intriguing mixture of sensuality and chagrin. There is hardly a false moment in her performance, never a trace of calculation or caricature. She is a major actress.

sb Jay Cocks

Robert Altman has a healthy respect both for good movies and a good time. Indeed, for him, the two often go together. "Making movies is like playing baseball--the fun is the playing," he says in a benevolently ursine growl. To keep the juices flowing and spirits running high, Altman enjoys and enforces a continuous party atmosphere; he likes to keep cast and crew together both onset and off hours. "At the end of the day, I drink a lot, smoke a lot of dope, and loosen up," Altman, 50, explained to TIME'S Jean Vallely. Katherine Reed, Altman's third wife (they have been married for 16 years), corroborates Altman's account. "My husband's favorite things are smoking dope and having good parties."

The camaraderie around an Altman film influences, sometimes even shapes the final result. "I think of California Split as 'my Altman experience,' " George Segal says. "He makes you believe you can do anything." On Nashville, Altman put the entire cast and crew up at the same motel, expected performers to stick around all through the shooting and paid his stars a modest $1,000 for each of the ten weeks of shooting. During working periods, he would treat them with the sort of care and give them the kind of controlled freedom that make actors swear lifelong loyalty to a director. Ronee Blakley wrote her own onstage mad scene; Barbara Baxley provided a moving drunken meditation on the Kennedy brothers.

"Working with Bob is like building him a train," says Writer Joan Tewkesbury. "You've got to enter through the engine and leave through the caboose. How you get through the cars in between doesn't really matter." Altman is both current headmaster and leading pupil in what might be called the grab-it-and-go-with-it school of film making, where accidents and incidental inspirations are encouraged, then capitalized on. The results of this sort of freewheeling are frequently felicitous (as in Nashville or last year's Thieves Like Us), sometimes unfocused and disconcerting. Elliott Kastner, producer of The Long Goodbye, one of Altman's muzziest and (as the director himself concedes) least satisfying films, characterizes his former collaborator with epithets like "narcissistic," "totally contemptuous," "perverse."

Eternal Gambler. Altman responds with similar heat and even physical threat to a variety of foes. "We almost came to blows," reports Allen Garfield, who is excellent as Blakley's manager-spouse in Nashville. "Later, he told me he backed off because he was unsure how strong I was. I told him I backed off because I was afraid of him." Born in Kansas City, Mo., Altman still has a Midwestern twang and an occasional fondness for the sort of frontier brawling he portrayed in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. He is apt to mouth off to strangers in bars, but longtime Altman Stalwart Michael Murphy reports: "I've never seen Bob throw a punch."

Murphy has seen his friend brush with poverty more than a few times since Altman's days as a director of TV series such as Combat and watched him risk his last few borrowed dollars on a 6-to-1 shot at Hollywood Park. An ebullient, eternal gambler, Altman has the veteran's sense of having his money on a winner this time around. He has his next four movies--including a version of E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime--lined up like dominoes. He predicts with Nashville, "I'm gonna make all the money in the world." Then he adds, never forgetting that first things come first: "Boy, this is fun."

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