Critics reviews

There is a sense in which Nashville represented a last bit of Sixties utopianism — the idea that a bunch of talented people might just hang out together in a colorful environment and, almost spontaneously, generate a movie.

Most epics are merely crowded; Nashville is multifarious. [It's a] deft societal cross-section, a carousel of studies in musical performance, a caustic satire of show business and politics, a reckless formal gambit, and the biggest canvas Altman ever painted on.

In Nashville, the background is just as important as the foreground, and this diffusion of focus allows Altman and his collaborators to build a whole world out of minuscule interactions. As its bits and pieces accumulate, Nashville bustles like a Brueghel cityscape.

As much as any Altman film, NASHVILLE is filled to the brim with things to watch. But it's equally dense with things to hear, encouraging the viewer to fully be a listener as well. The soundtrack is integral to NASHVILLE's mosaic structure, bursting with brilliant dialog (scripted? improvised? does it matter?) that can't possibly be taken in all at one sitting.

Nashville hits its emotional peak during three harrowing public performances... Collectively, these scenes are so devastatingly poignant that they put to rest any suggestion that Altman's goal is to score easy points.

In this scene, Altman tells you more in a few spare moments about the emotional texture of a showbiz couple than most actual biopics manage over the course of their entire running times, and the miracle of Nashville resides in just how many similarly evocative and empathetic scenes Altman and his amazing cast manage to forge over the course of 160 minutes.

One cannot claim that there's an overarching discipline to the filmmaking, and that's certainly part of Nashville's charm and brilliance: it's an unbridled, cacophonous, and, above all, humane examination of our nation's tendency to self-idolize, and it's so potentially overwhelming in its glossiness that a certain raggedness helps to make it palatable.

Robert Altman's Nashvilleendures because it is habitable. What the critic and novelist Gilbert Auder wrote about Jacques Tati's epic also goes for Altman's: Nashville "is not merely set in a city, it itself is a city, a proliferation of perspectives, a multifarious mesh of signs, a semiotic utopia. The spectator cannot hope to comprehend its complete topography in a single viewing and ends by browsing rather than reading the imagery.

A rich ‘dialectic collage' of contradictory attitudes and diverse realities is what brings the film so vibrantly to life, and to launch moralistic rockets on such a shifting base is to miss its achievement entirely. In point of fact, the film celebrates as much as it ridicules — often doing both at the same time — while giving both its brilliant cast and its audience too much elbow room to allow for any overriding thesis.

...For me "novelistic" is not just network, but nuance too. Altman has given star billing to 24 performers, but he's cheating on at least half a dozen of them... I hate to go out on a limb after only one viewing, but Nashville strikes me as Altman's best film, and the most exciting dramatic musical since Blue Angel. And, like you said, it's the music that puts it over.

I think that the power and the theme of the film lie in the fact that while some characters are more "major" than others, they are all subordinated to the music itself. It's like a river, running through the film, running through their life. They contribute to it, are united for a time, lose out, die out, but the music, as the last scene suggests, continues.