Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 7 May

Nashville (Altman, 1975)

Reader TH made a com­ment a couple of weeks ago which ended with:

Being able to stream amaz­ing doc­u­ment­ar­ies [on DocPlay] makes up in a tiny way for the inab­il­ity to stream almost any clas­sic movies.

Regular read­ers will know this is a source of frus­tra­tion for me too, espe­cially in a New Zealand con­text that lacks stream­ers liker Max, Peacock, Paramount+ or Criterion Channel that have access to big leg­acy libraries.

So, it behooves me to cel­eb­rate the occa­sion­al arrival of a clas­sic on one of our loc­al main­stream stream­ers. Indeed, they may not be pro­moted very effect­ively, but there are some greats to be found below the sur­face on Neon.

One of these is Robert Altman’s big, bloated, unwieldy but essen­tial 1970s polit­ic­al satire, Nashville. A multi-character, semi-improvised, vir­tu­ally plot­less exam­in­a­tion of a post-Watergate, post-Kennedy, post-Vietnam USA turns out to still have some­thing to say about 21^st cen­tury Trumpian America. Who knew?

The film fol­lows an ensemble of artists, music industry man­agers, hangers-on and wan­nabes over a sum­mer week­end in the Music City as it pre­pares for a polit­ic­al rally slash con­cert pro­mot­ing a mys­ter­i­ous third party pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate called Hal Philip Walker. Walker nev­er appears but his voice is heard often, blar­ing out from the speak­ers on top of a branded cam­paign van and his policies appear to be pop­u­list and dis­rupt­ive – no law­yers allowed in Congress, no tax breaks for reli­gious organ­isa­tions, etc. He rep­res­ents a cyn­icism about main­stream polit­ics that was com­mon in America in that peri­od but from this dis­tance, I’m not cer­tain how the film feels about him.

At the time, coun­try music was not the over­whelm­ing cul­tur­al force that it has since become. Indeed, the film can feel a bit con­des­cend­ing towards an art form that it is more inter­ested in anthro­po­lo­gising than tak­ing ser­i­ously. The per­former char­ac­ters are drawn from life but cari­ca­tured – Henry Gibson’s schem­ing Nudie-suit wear­ing pat­ri­arch Haven Hamilton, Ronee Blakley’s psy­cho­lo­gic­ally fra­gile Tammy Wynette-like Bobbie Jean, Timothy Brown as the Charlie Pride stand-in Tommy Brown, keep­ing his head down in an industry where he is the only not­able black artist.

Everyone in this Nashville knows that coun­try music is B‑list and it’s espe­cially appar­ent when real-life A‑listers show up – Oscar nom­in­ee Elliott Gould and Oscar win­ner Julie Christie cameo­ing as them­selves. It’s remark­able how much sup­port the film gets from actu­al Nashville when it paints such a tacky por­trait. The huge con­tri­bu­tion of the lame theme park Opryville (home of the Grand Olé Opry) to the film’s verisimil­it­ude is essen­tial but naïve. Wouldn’t hap­pen today.

For a genu­ine coun­try fan (such as myself) the music in the film can be dis­ap­point­ing. Many of the songs were writ­ten by the act­ors to be sung by their char­ac­ters and only Karen Black’s two con­tri­bu­tions, Henry Gibson’s very funny “200 Years” and the Oscar-winning “I’m Easy” by Keith Carradine stand up to scrutiny.

Carradine’s aim­less folk-rocker Tom is a remark­able cre­ation and makes you won­der why he didn’t become as big a star as Harrison Ford. The scene he shares with unlikely gos­pel sing­er (and moth­er of two deaf chil­dren) Lily Tomlin is heartbreaking.

Is Nashville one of the greatest films ever made, as some have dubbed it? Doubtful from this dis­tance, but it is still a fas­cin­at­ing win­dow on a time and place as the seeds of the cul­ture wars that we are suf­fer­ing from now are sown.

We get requests

Thom York has a new record out on Friday – Tall Tales is a col­lab­or­a­tion with pro­du­cer Mark Pritchard and there’s a kind of video ver­sion of the album to go along with it that plays in cinemas for one night only on Thursday. The visu­als are by Australian artist Jonathan Zawada and they are pretty trippy (although the weirder the song is, the more com­pre­hens­ible the visu­als are and vice versa).

Most of it is sur­real com­puter gen­er­ated anim­a­tion but there’s one track where the visu­als are a kind of glob­al travelogue (remin­is­cent of the film Anthropocene from 2018), one fea­tures archive foot­age of north­ern English 1950s urchins play­ing in a black and white bombed out waste ground, and the song “The Conversation Is Missing Your Voice” uses stock foot­age from a GoPro on a postal sort­ing con­vey­or belt that was filmed in a New Zealand Courier Post depot, so sound the Aotearoa rel­ev­ance klax­on, I guess.

This is the kind of thing that will be bewitch­ing in a cinema con­text and fel­low Substacker Chris Schulz has gone into things a little deep­er than I can muster here at Boiler Room.

Where to watch Nashville

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia: Digital rental

Canada: Digital rental

Ireland: Digital rental

India: Digital rent­al from Amazon

USA: Digital purchase

UK: Digital rental