Word: altmans
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...cookbookers, of course, were all over the actors. "That's it! It must be a male camaraderie movie!" Male camaraderie was very big last summer, and suddenly Altman was playing the Newman-Redford. Woodward-Bernstein game. Depending on what: they thought of the picture, the critics had California Split down as a good army-buddies film, or a poor take-off on The Sting...
...with Nashville, they were in trouble. What do you do with 24 characters? Now Altman was making explicit his concern for making movies about communities rather than internal personal conflicts. And the California Split problem was solved. At last the let's-get-high-and-decide-what-we're-gonna-shoot-tomorrow theory of handling actors could operate the way it was supposed to, without eager stars killing each other off. Now they could follow their own instincts about a role, because, there was no intrinsically dramatic situation for them to get caught...
...oblivious to his wounded arm, thinking of the audience before himself. "This isn't Dallas, this is Nashville. Let's show 'em what we're made of!" If one's inclined to make value judgements about specific moments here, the gesture is either redeeming or it is not. But Altman and Gibson developed the character in a less good guy/bad guy way. He is merely a man who defines himself through his audience--a totally public identity. This may be courage: more likely his soothing of the flock after the assassination is a method of control: Altman's last shot...
...usual with Altman, it depends on what the color of your glasses is at the time. Either "It Don't Worry Me" is a stirring cry of survival, or the horrible chant of a wired mass for whom murder doesn't matter. Or a million other things, but the cookbook crowd tried frantically to answer this question, because the only anchor they could find in this plotless, characterless, messageless mass was that Nashville was about "America." America is very big this summer, maybe, but it's a frustrating theme for people accustomed to motion pictures telling them what to think...
...Kraft can rest easy; Altman evades the trap of defining America. Indeed, in making Nashville, he jettisoned (with a couple of exceptions that mar the film) the last obstacle to making a purely descriptive movie: he junked the concept of the filmmaker himself. Opal, the BBC reporter, busily chronicling American and acting sillier than the Nashvilleans, is a parody of Altman. And the cookbook critics, trying to get a grip on themselves, string adjectives together searching...