Nashville | | Cast : | Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield | | Director : | Robert Altman | | Studio : | Paramount Home Video | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen, Dolby | | Released Date : | January 01, 1975 | | DVD Released Date : | March 01, 2004 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Subtitled), English (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | August 24, 2005 | | Summary | Altman was doing something right | Content
 | Nashville is not a film that will likely appeal to everyone. It is over two and a half hours long with over an hour of country music numbers and a cast featuring 24 LEAD roles. The film is chaotic and muffled and difficult to follow. It is also the best example of political satire since Dr. Strangelove.
It's difficult to explain just how this movie works. It's a portrait of various people (mostly musicians) in all walks of life. The anchor of the film is the primary bicentennial election. A political rally for "Replacement Party" candidate Hal Philip Walker is about to be held at Nashville's replica Parthenon. A van travels around the city blasting his speeches about what's wrong with the government. His views, for the most part, are right on the dot, but we see through his representatives and spokespersons that he is just as brutal and corrupt as any politician.
We never actually see the man, or find out much about his politics, past his views on the smells of Christmas.
Robert Altman, best known for Korean War comedy M*A*S*H, does a superb job combining Hollywood craftmanship with an independent edge. Nashville is highly stylized while brutally honest. The music is more than just a backdrop to the plot, it is part of the plot. For example, there is a scene in which Keith Carradine performs a song called "I'm Easy" in a bar. He says he wrote it for someone who just might be here tonight. Four different girls in the audience beam with the knowledge he wrote it for her.
Keith Carradine's character is the most obvious example of a sexist in the picture, but sexism is one of the resounding motifs throughout the film. It explores the subtlety of the concept. Women in the film are appreciated for their looks or their talent but never for themselves. Such is the case during a scene when singer Barbara Jean (Ronnie Blakley) is in a hospital bed after collapsing. Half a dozen of her closest friends come in, talk to each other for about 3 minutes, then leave. Later her husband/manager tells her, "Don't tell me how to run your life." She realizes her only friends are her fans so during her next conert she compulsively makes small talk when she should be singing.
The film is basically a great opening, an astounding ending, and tons of filler in between, but that filler is some of the most interesting filmmaking ever seen. This film provides no clear answers because that would just be more politics. This film could've been a train crash in the hands of any other director. It's chaotic and probably over a lot of heads, but "It Don't Worry Me."
PS: Someone gets assassinated, I won't say who though. ;) |
| Rating | | | Date | March 21, 2005 | | Summary | The Rules in Rhinestones | Content
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Beneath it's sequined veneer, Robert Altman's Nashville recalls the director's acknowledged hero Jean Renoir and his 1939 masterwork The Rules of the Game. Like Rules, Nashville observes a society engulfed in its own pretensions and tells a cautionary tale that would later prove tragically prophetic (Rules was released on the eve of the German invasion; Nashville would predate John Lennon's assassination by 5-years). But it's the characters themselves that are most informed by the forbearance. There are more than a few strains of similarity between Henry Gibson's Haven Hamilton, for example, and Marcel Dalio's Robert de la Chesnay. Notice how Haven delivers the cloying ballad "For the Sake of the Children" to the Grand Ole Opry audience and compare to Chesnay's proud and self-conscious display of his latest calliope. Barbara Jean closely recalls Christine; a tortured starlet who grows exasperated amongst a throng of admirers. Likewise, Scott Glenn's marine approximates André Jurieu and his pathetic single-minded devotion. Most notably, the running social commentary blaring from the omni-present presidential campaign van is a uniquely 70s Americana update to Octave, Renoir's own character who provides the "moral voice" in The Rules of the Game.
However, if the characters and plot points strike a similarity, the stylistic footprint left by each director could not be more different. Renoir's work is insular, meticulous and choreographed, whereas Altman's is expansive and consciously undisciplined. This allows for some moments of unsanitized satirical magic; witness the pom-pom rifle brigade at the airport or the giggling audience members at the Opry, but it also exposes Nashville's few major flaws. The beautifully understated satire sometimes boils over into screwball territory, as when Geraldine Chaplin interviews a phalanx of cars at a junkyard or a bit player pontificates about the Kennedy assassination. Likewise, the unannounced cameos by Hollywood actors; especially those from previous Altman pictures, smacks of self-parody and threatens to expose the transparency of the filmmaking process itself. Where this works beautifully in The Player, it stands out awkwardly in the country music universe of Nashville. Given the documentarian zeal of Altman's vision, however, one is more than willing to forgive him the occasional in-joke. |
| Rating | | | Date | January 17, 2005 | | Summary | Crowded House | Content
| Like alot of Robert Altman films, "Nashville" is an interesting film but the large cast and numerous plot threads seem to trip over one another. Ultimately, I wonder what Altman is trying to say because his message is not coherent. There's just too much information being thrown at us. The size of the cast gave few of the actors a chance to really shine with one exception. Gwen Welles as a waitress who deludes herself that she is a good singer gives a truly heartbreaking performance that will stay with you. The music in the film isn't particularly memorable. My understanding was that the city fathers of Nashville were not particularly helpful with this production because Altman's liberal sensibilities did not exactly cohere with the town's conservative bent. One thing I can say about this disc is Altman delivers an engaging commentary. Even if your not a fan of Altman's work check out his commentaries on this film, "M*A*S*H", and "McCabe and Mrs. Miller." |
| Rating | | | Date | January 16, 2005 | | Summary | One of the greatest American films | Content
| There have been few American films in the latter half of the twentieth century quite so influential as NASHVILLE, which attempts to sum up no less than the feelings of homelessness and betrayal in American life after the Sixties and Watergate, and the way popular culture acts to ameliorate these problems and to blind us to them as well. The film covers five days in the life of 24 characters in the summer of 1975, as a campaign manager assembles a series of country western stars for a benefit concert for a third-party candidate at the Nashville Parthenon in Centennial Park; along the way we get a kind of thin slice of each of their lives, and a look in particular at their relation to poltics, to sexual and racial mores, and to the country-music industry. Although the DVD does not have the kind of extras that a film of this stature deserves, it still has a very intriguing commentary by Robert Altman that shows you what a happy accident much of the film turned out to be: how some of the most famous and oft-quoted bits of dialogue (such as Barbara Baxley's heartfelt ode to the Kennedy brothers) were improvisations of the cast at the time. The film has a kind of texture and richness to it that almost no other film before it could macth, and it has been imitated (by Altman himself, among others) since it first appeared. What most of the imitations have missed, however, is the kind of linchpin that Ronee Blakeley's performance as Barbara Jean, the central character, provides. Lovely and special, Blakely makes evident why the public and the other country-western stars adores her character so much (there's a marvelous bit of business in the famous "Opry Belle" sequence that makes this clear when Barbara Jean first walks onstage to perform: she is gallantly escorted out by one of the dancers and waves to her fans from a doorway; only as the intro to the song swells does she step up close to them and to the camera to begin her first great number, "The Cowboy Song"). Although most of the film's other performers cannot sing very well and their numbers are mostly terrible (which is part of Altman's point: country music at the time was primarily a democratic folk art gaining enormous popularity), Blakely's Barbara Jean is an extraordinary singer. Her beautiful final song, "My Idaho Home," which is used at the film's great climax, provides a kind of summa for the entire movie in its fond memories of a unified Amnerican family life despite hardship and deprivation. This is Altman's greatest and most famous film, and deserves repeated viewings. |
| Rating | | | Date | December 15, 2004 | | Summary | Altman is alive and well... | Content
| After "MASH", Robert Altman made some exceptional films, most notably "McCabe & Mrs. Miller". He loved the idea of the ensemble cast. "Nashville" is the first of his mind-blowing endeavors to bring multiple incredible characters together. At 3 hours, the film is not boring for a minute, Character development is so complete. To single out a performance would be tough, but I really liked Barbara Harris as the confused and goofy wannabe who actually brought it all together at the end. Oscar nominated performances from Lily Tomlin and Ronee Blakely (in her film debut) were impressive, as well as Henry Gibson, and a particularly touching performance by Keenan Wynn.Altman is a very precise director, and his devotion to the proceedings is prevalent throughout. The fact that Joan Tewkesbury's amazing screenplay received no recognition still escapes me. Every song in this film is original, and all are great. Blakely's songs are well presented, but one of the most devastating moments is when Keith Carradine sings "I'm Easy" (Oscar winner). It's the first time I remember a Best Song winner being an integral part of the plot of the film (possible exception: Que sara sara from "The Man Who Knew Too Much"). While Carradine sings this song, every woman in the audience thinks he's singing it to her. There are repercussions. Altman is always great, and only gets greater. His next film, "Three Women", was more intimate and so brilliant. The epitome of Altman ensemble has to be "Short Cuts", but don't miss "Cookie's Fortune" or "Gosford Park". "Nashville" is a true American original. Don't miss it! |
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