Live Poll: Movies Which Were Hard to Finish

When Baby-Boomers were Millennials...
My rendezvous with "Nashville" goes back to seven years ago, I could get any movie I wanted but "Nashville" resisted. I needed to see the fifth Best Picture nominee of 1975, this very movie Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael raved about, that topped both Ebert and Siskel's annual top ten, this American Film Institute's Top 100 entry that was a total mystery to me.
It took seven years but better late than never… At first, I didn't get what was so brilliant about it but so many story lines and only one viewing? I saw it again. And then, I went like "oh, what the heck", a third time won't hurt. Three times in less than four days, could have been four or five times, as many as the stars in the American flag, that's how good it is. This is one flew over a cuckoo's nest you don't recover from, and the more ordinary people and situations are, the more extraordinary the journey is. Altman should be damned… if he wasn't such a genius.
The film spans a period of five days during a country-music festival, coinciding with some populist politician's party rally, this is enough to have a panoramic view across the lives of dozens of characters who, through their considerable differences, reach ever possible dimension of the American spirit of 1975, and in such a way that I guess even a non-American can enjoy it. Well, there's me at least.
So, what is "Nashville"? Simply, the Mecca of country music, the reason why everybody came in the first place and were reunited by the end.There are dozens of them but there's no small part in the sense that they're all equally small in the scale of the significance of music, the common thread, the real star. Some sing, some wish they could, some manage or look for singers, some screw or get screwed by them… or just pop up and aimlessly wander, like in real life, no one crosses your path who should necessarily has a significance.
I wonder to which extent these fascinating hazards were part of Joan Tewkesbury's script or improvised by the actors… the same way they wrote their own songs.
And not any songs, country songs… this is crucial because country music isn't just deeply rooted in American tradition, it is also the most cinematic of all forms of music: it tells stories.
I can perhaps tell you the name of four or five country singers but I know a great deal about the way country music affects me, because any song I hear finds a powerful echo in my own memories. It is like this scene from "The Simpsons" where Homer leaves the house after an argument and hears Lurleen Lumpkin singing "Your wife doesn't understand you but I do". You listen to country music because you feel like 'it' has listened to you in the first place.
Just compare the upbeat patriotic starting song from Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) "we must have done something right to last 200 years" with the neutral political slogans the loudspeaker keep on hammering all day, which one will reach the hearts first? Compare the obnoxiousness of the character played by Keith Carradine who seemed to have gotten half the female cast on his bed with the melancholic tune of his "I'm Easy" you can't even tell whether he has pride or contempt toward himself, but the gaze of Lilly Tomlin while listening to him says everything.
Music is like the only way to arouse genuine emotions, in another powerful scene, a wannabe singer (Glew Welels) of mediocre talent gets booed, she can only indulge to a striptease to provoke the cheers. In another scene, a father doesn't even have the patience to listen to his deaf son's story as if silence was the antithesis of communication, and music its apotheosis.
Many people communicate, others don't… some meet, others don't… I remember a girl in high school, we never talked together, never went in the same class, but for some reason, we always met in some place or another. When it became obviously repetitive, we smiled at each other; like a private joke. Just like in "Nashville", the more we meet these people, the more we care for them, as we care for ourselves.
Only the New Hollywood period could have made this gem possible, a time where America was still mourning an innocence and where the baby-boomers like today's millennials (count me among them) were cherishing their childhood, a time without the Vietnam War, incarnated by a Wizard-of-Oz-like childhood, Kennedy's dashing smile, the very American Pie Don McLean said bye-bye to.
And this end-of-an-era is magnificently captured by the performance of Roney Blakely (Oscar-nominated along with Tolmin) as a fragile and emotionally vulnerable country singer named Barbara Jean. She's a sweet and delicate flower with a ticking bomb of a heart, she faints at her arrival, in her first representation, she interrupts her songs to mumble about her childhood until her husband (Allen Garfield) takes her away, simply overwhelmed, and easily upset like a part of America is.
But there's room for every possible identification: capitalists, disillusioned soldiers, drifters, lunatic, has-beens, romantics and losers, this is a microcosm of America, all in characters and emotions, for the sake of laughs, anger, tears, frustration, the spirit of a country in a nutshell and its heart is Barbara Jean, whose "Idaho Home" song awakened again that symptomatic feeling of millennials: being nostalgic over eras we didn't live.
And if I could keep one image from these 240 minutes, I'd keep the sight of the American flag gently rippling under the wind while Barbara Jean sings "we were young then, we were together. We could bear floods and fire and bad weather", hell, how can I seriously write a thousand-word review when this image alone speaks for a thousand words.