Released smack-dab in the middle of the 70s, like some gravitational mass at the center of the galaxy, Robert Altman’s Nashville is the defining work of a decade when iconoclasts upended Hollywood and took stock of the country during a turbulent stretch.
For Altman, it was the culmination of a film-making style he had been refining since M*A*S*H in 1970, one built on spontaneity, a rich evocation of time and place, and actors empowered to create characters who seem to simply exist in their worlds, rather than impose themselves on it. The offhand magic of Nashville is that it feels modest, despite a who’s who of two dozen stars convening for an epic that offers Music City as a microcosm for America herself. Rarely are great films this casually profound.
