Rating: 5/5
You may say that I ain’t free, but that don’t worry me
It’s America — all those crashed cars and mangled corpses…
In Nashville, music can be your whole life and their songs can be campaign promises — full of contradictions and ultimately empty — recorded music the feedback loop by which image self-replicates and defines reality
Like a Don DeLillo novel, subtle subversion ripples throughout the story — a non-political discourse in the homespun tales of love, loss, and family form the simulacrum of safety under which exploitation and grief maneuver
Also like a DeLillo novel, the film is hilarious without me being able to say exactly why. A line reading can be taken at face value or treated as a farce and still functions either way
Early in watching the film, I decided to treat it like a Christopher Guest film. And sure enough, Geraldine Chaplin arrives as his Parker Posey. Recommend — I had a blast
I could quibble about the amount of music or the heavy-handed foreshadowing, but I honestly don’t care. This is a singular experience — I can only compare it to other Altman films
I plan to watch it again soon with Altman’s commentary
Stray Thoughts
- Is Merle Kilgore playing Trout where Kilgore Trout comes from? Obviously not, but what an odd coincidence
- I love Karen Black, her performance fully humanizes Connie White and breaks my heart
- Is Jeff Goldblum supposed to look cool in this? I haven’t seen Easy Rider
- How is every song in this movie perfect?