'Nashville': The acerbic genius of Robert Altman

Lily Tomlin and Keith Carradine in Nashville

I just revisited the late Robert Altman's 1975 classic Nashville on Criterion. It's a sprawling, ambitious riot and it holds up because it's such a prescient indictment of post-Watergate America.

If you can get past the country songs, there are these fully realized performances from a dream cast (Lily Tomlin, Keith Carradine, Ned Beatty, Michael Murphy and many, many more).

It's devastatingly funny -- the Geraldine Chaplin BBC reporter character brings down the house -- but for me its greatness is its cynicism.

Ostensibly the film is about the different people who are converging in Nashville during the middle of a presidential campaign and music festival. What it's really about is sex, death, loneliness, dishonesty and denial.

Watching this '70s-era classic made me look back on my favorite Robert Altman films. I'm sad he's gone because he had such a signature voice. I love an auteur that is so identifiable in terms of their use of the film language. But he left such a treasure trove of work behind.

M*A*S*H (1970): The movie that started it all. Besides being the first Hollywood film to feature the F-word, this raucous politically incorrect anti-war comedy made unlikely movie stars out of Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould and had a huge influence on my budding sense of humor when I was in high school.


The Long Goodbye (1973): Altman does his subversive take on the quintessential detective character of Philip Marlowe on this sneaky brilliant film starring a never-better Elliot Gould. The tone is oddball comedy until very suddenly it isn't and you realize this is actually a serious statement on the era in which it was made.

Popeye (1980): The director's much maligned musical is remembered as a box office bomb -- but it actually made plenty of money. It's ridiculously charming (one of Robin Williams better on-screen comedic roles, because for once he underplays) and has wonderful songs that still hold up by the great Harry Nilsson.

The Player (1992): His Hollywood comeback film brutally mocks the industry better than any film I've ever seen. A top-notch thriller and a fantastically fun black comedy. This film is a showcase for its star Tim Robbins, and its director, who has a field day with the material. The opening one-take shot is the stuff of legend. When I used to work at a video store this was one of my picks!

Short Cuts (1993): Paying homage to Raymond Carver while updating Nashville for the '90s. Another big all-star cast: Altman regulars like Tomlin and Robbins, as well as Julianne Moore, Andie MacDowell, Tom Waits and Jack Lemmon (again, just to name a few) enliven this ambitious epic about lives crossing paths in Los Angeles.

Robert Altman

A Prairie Home Companion (2006): Most would dismiss this as lesser Altman because of the subject matter and the presence of Lindsay Lohan, but I had a lot of fun with this one -- which feels bittersweet because it turned out to be Altman's last film (I recall that P.T. Anderson had to be on set to take over in case the eighty-something director died). I used to love listening to this radio show as a kid (even though I didn't get the humor) and so this one touched me.

Altman definitely isn't for all tastes -- which is probably why he had so little commercial success during his career. He got an honorary Oscar before he died but never won for best director. With all do respect to Milos Forman, I think he should have won for Nashville.

It's the movie that shows him at the peak of his powers. It's filled with these incredible little moments like Carradine's philanderer character singing "I'm Easy" and the camera panning around the room to all the women that think it's about them, until it settles on Tomlin for a devastating shot. Or how Henry Gibson is always promoting the city of Nashville and himself. Or the constant, principled political commentary of fictional candidate Hal Phillip Walker, who we never even see.

I love a movie that couldn't be made today -- a film that parodies faux patriotism and points a finger at the violent nature of America. It's important to cherish and revisit movies like these because we probably won't get them again.

But it don't worry me.