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 21st 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 Ole Opry) to the film’s verisimilitude is essential but naive. 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.

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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.

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Where to watch Nashville