Nashville represents the perfect meeting of story and storyteller. The screenplay is all character and theme with no allowances made for plot to get in the way. The structure of the Nashville resembles what is unquestionably Robert Altman’s greatest commercial success as well as what many still regard as his greatest artistic success. Unlike MASH, however, Nashville never even makes the attempt to project some sort of conventional plot element into the narrative to transform it into a “story.” MASH begins with the arrival of “Hawkeye” Pierce at 4077th and concludes with his departure, thus in a sense—as loosely defined as it may be—turning MASH into a story “about” the impact of Hawkeye on mobile surgical hospital.
Nashville dispenses with even that semblance of a structural foundation. No single character can really be declared more important than another. There is no arc which follows the trajectory of one character from the beginning to the end in a way that would allow the whole thing to collapse were that character removed.
Everything that is familiarly “Altmanesque” is on full display in Nashville. Dialogue replicates the reality of everyday discourse with people speaking over each other in a natural way. Transitions between scenes come abruptly and without conventional editing techniques that connect scene to the next. Characters interaction is significant over the long haul rather than scene-based.
Altman’s most successful films are not based on following plot lines or developing characters in relation to narrative events. His films come alive through examination of moments in the lives of characters that serve to reveal larger truths about the world beyond them. Nashville brings together characters from the worlds of entertainment and politics without allowing any of them to undergo any significant change or evolution. Who they are when they are first introduced is who they are when the film concludes. Even when a major dramatic even occurs at the end that in a conventional film would produce an emotional catharsis, the audience is not allowed or even invited to make a deep emotional investment. The characters are interesting and worth examining not in and of themselves, but because of how they relate to each other and how those interrelationships make a commentary upon the audience’s understanding of the real world around them.
Most of the characters are not very sympathetic, quite a few are phonies and almost everyone can be accurately described as existing in a state of discontent. Altman’s method of telling the story with a camera in constant movement, characters that blur into one another, dialogue delivered as if one were eavesdropping and the pervasive and insistent message that the worlds of politics and show business are both really about nothing more than marketing empty messages all work toward getting the audience to ask themselves if they also exist in such a state of discontent. And, if so, why doesn’t it worry them?
