Roger Altman’s Nashville is a complex film, almost like six or seven movies laid on top of each other. Densely packed stories unfold sometimes intertwined, sometimes parallel to each other, illustrating remarkably unself-aware characters in various pursuits: aspiring country singers trying to start their careers, political organizers mining Nashville for credibility, and the assorted hangers-on. Accompanying the story are country/western performances with a range of quality you might expect to encounter in Nashville, from truly great to professionally competent to completely hopeless.
Altman’s frantic style is easily facilitated by the enormous ensemble cast, with dialogue concerning two or more different storylines being delivered almost on top of each other. The frequently comical antics of the characters belie the complexity of their inner lives, glimpsed occasionally but increasingly as the film progresses.
Nashville’s early comedy-masquerading-as-drama slowly morphs into more genuine drama presented as great tragicomedy.
Well, I've finally seen my first Robert Altman film. It was all quite by accident, I was reading an article on unconventional 70's thrillers which listed The Long Goodbye alongside films such as The Parallax View and Klute from a director I admire, Alan J. Pakula. So I added it to my Fatso queue, where it languished for a few months until I finally decided to give it a go. Turns out, the film is one of the most entertaining and bonkers riffs on film noir I've encountered. Altman's original style is so confidently executed, Elliott Gould's performance so entertaining and sparky that I was constantly engrossed despite the web-like and seemingly disjointed plotting.
Gould achieves the tough task of making his breezy, scattered Philip Marlowe a commanding one by making those qualities the very charm of his character; the swaggered saunter of a walk, his off-hand slouch and smark-alack one liners are part of what make him so endearing to us. He seems as bemused as we are at the gonzo goings-on in this bizarre hippie neo-noir, that he makes for an entertaining companion the encourages us to simply let this kooky film carry us along.
But I couldn't say the film is all about Gould (as good as he is) because he is matched step by step with a director who displays refreshing originality that can back it up with confident execution. Altman is able to visually seduce us into every scene, making us feel the emotional currents as a way to guide us through the story, which on its own can often be quite opaque. At one point husband and wife Eilleen Wade (Nina van Pallandt) and Roger Wade (a brilliantly bellowing Sterling Hayden) have an argument in their beach side home while Marlowe is at the beach waiting for them to finish. The motivations for their quarrel remain murky (as many character motivations in this film do), but the tension keeps mounting anyway, through Altman's dynamic visuals. The camera is always in motion, zooming in on the actors, and the choice to film the scene from outside the house to be able to show the reflection of Gould at the beach off the window creates a effect similar to double exposure, to a dream-like effect. I kept thinking as I watched the film that it often had the same quality as dreams - narratively incoherent but while in it, it feels perfectly emotionally plausible.
In Altman's bizarro world where gangsters spontaneously strip, in which all diegetic music is a rearrangement of the title song, and where the neighbors are a half-naked group of hippie girls doing yoga on their front porch, things are all slightly off, character motivations slightly wonky. And quite frankly this is a world I'd like to visit again.
This article in the Financial Times by Roger Altman is one of the best short pieces that I have read in some time for packing a lot of thought into a short space. When I started reading it I though it was going to be another one of those "gee whiz" pieces on the potential for energy independence through recent natural gas and shale oil results from fracking, but it is much more than this.
Altman goes several steps further than the typical newspaper columnist in considering the political and economic consequences of increased energy production in the developed world, and I think that he is mostly correct in his conclusions. If recent technologies for extracting natural gas and extracting oil from shale play out as many now expect, this will have significant consequences for the international political order.
With the declining role of the Middle East as a source of fossil fuels, Altman thinks that the US can reduce its military role in the region, which means even less political volatility in a region that will be made less volatile because less central to world events.
Further, while the developed nation-states will be subject to fewer political and economic uncertainties, China seems on course to inherit most of the importation of oil from the Middle East, and many of the problems that come with this.
I am not so sure about this last conclusion, since the oil markets since 1973 have functioned globally to the point that any disruption for any oil importer anywhere in the world immediately led to price volatility everywhere else in the world. If this model continues, the fact that Middle East oil mostly goes to China shouldn't make that big of a difference. Domestic producers will do all that they can to preserve windfall profits of this kind, and the public has become accustomed to it and is not (in my judgment) all that likely to hold their domestic producers to account.
However, if Altman is correct in all his claims (and he may well be correct), these events will further contribute to the shift to a Pacific-centered world order about which I have recently written several posts.
