“Nashville” (1975)
If you were to ask the question, “what is Robert Altman’s ‘Nashville’ really about?” a not-so-bad answer might be “America.” While “Nashville” is set against the country music scene of Tennessee’s capital city, the films is really about the tangled web of strivers, crackpots, artists, mystics and blue-collar folks that make up the fabric of the country itself. It’s very much the archetypal “Altman” film as we’ve come to define it recently: a bustling ensemble piece with dozens of lead players, shot with his signature wandering camera, including poetic bursts of overlapping dialogue and a general outsider, rebellious sensibility. The movie is also possibly Altman’s most influential work —certainly younger directors like Paul Thomas Anderson and David Gordon Green owe a considerable degree of their own aesthetic to it. Yet above all, “Nashville” is a snapshot of a forgotten time in our country, and the people who once inhabited it. Whether it’s Keith Carradine’s sneering, sinuous rock star, the shattered Vietnam vet played by a young Scott Glenn, Lily Tomlin’s gospel-singing mother of two or just Elliott Gould being Elliott Gould, “Nashville” boasts some of the director’s most memorable and emotionally multifaceted characters —not to mention a first-class soundtrack of country, blues and gospel hits. [A+]
“Buffalo Bill And The Indians, Or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson” (1976)
“Robert Altman’s Absolutely Unique And Heroic Enterprise Of Inimitable Lustre!!” is promised in the opening credits of the director’s mostly forgotten take on the Buffalo Bill myth. It’s just the first sardonic note in an uneven, overlong but often compellingly scathing screed on the false idols of American history. While 1971’s “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” is rightly regarded a seminal anti-western in the realist mold, here Altman turns his attention to artifice, with the film taking place entirely within the titular showgrounds. Headlined by an aging Buffalo Bill (Paul Newman) who reenacts his famous exploits for paying audiences, it’s quickly established that he’s a fraud, and that his persona is essentially an invention whose popularity is tested when Sitting Bull is hired for the show but refuses to participate in its simplistic narratives. Altman’s film uses a lot of his trademark loose-limbed techniques and features a sprawling cast, including a hilariously dimwitted Harvey Keitel, a charming Geraldine Chaplin and a solid Burt Lancaster among others, but it’s all anchored by Newman’s blazing turn. The film is at best shaggy (Altman claimed studio interference) especially in a trying opening 30 minutes or so, but beyond that, there are riches for the discovery if you have the patience. [B-]
“3 Women” (1977)
A strikingly unusual, dreamlike character study, Altman’s overlooked 1977 picture “3 Women” blends comedy and a loose, laissez-faire attitude with an eerie surrealism, becoming a cinephile favorite ever since Criterion rescued it from DVD exile in 2011. Starring Sissy Spacek, Altman muse Shelley Duvall and Janice Rule, it’s among Altman’s most opaque films, comparable to Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” in its exploration of buckling identity and fragile female relationships. Spacek stars as Pinky, an impressionable young girl sent to work in a Texas nursing home who gloms onto Millie (Duvall), her loquacious, personable, more experienced but cynical co-worker whom Pinky essentially tries to become. But their burgeoning friendship takes on a darker tone when a third woman enters the picture —artist and bartender Willie (Rule), who exposes and undermines the never-particularly-healthy relationship as the movie begins to sour and turn sinister in its latter half. Sinuous, mysterious and deeply unsettling, “3 Women” was influenced by a dream Altman never fully understood, and the film reads similarly — this is doubtless why it languished unseen for so long, but Altman brings something transformative and arresting to its elusiveness. [B+]
“A Wedding” (1978)
Like several other Altman pictures from this period, “A Wedding” has become a cult classic, albeit a little better known than many thanks to how closely it hews to the “signature” Altman style of multiple plots, overlapping dialogue and a cast extensive enough to make it a valuable pit stop in any game of Six Degrees of Separation. Starring Amy Stryker, Desi Arnaz Jr., Carol Burnett, Geraldine Chaplin, Mia Farrow, Lillian Gish, Viveca Lindfors, and Lauren Hutton, and set during a single day, the film follows the society wedding of “Muffin” Brenner (Stryker) and Dino Sloan Corelli (Arnaz). The couple, their families and their guests unravel as mishaps occur (like when the Bishop forgets his lines) and skeletons tumble out of both family closets (almost literally when the groom’s grandmother dies). As Roger Ebert wrote in his review, “this is the sort of material that easily lends itself to farce, and when it does, Altman cheerfully follows.” But then again, this is hardly a comedy, strictly speaking. Like so many Altman films, “A Wedding” oscillates between laughs and tears while touching on topics ranging from drug addiction to sexual deviancy to radical politics in an insightful satire on Chicago’s upper crust. [B+]
“Quintet” (1979)
Despite trying his hand at so many different types of film, Altman was never interested in genre as much as in human behavior and interaction, so it’s not surprising that his ill-fated attempt at sci-fi “Quintet,” didn’t exactly work. Set in a wintry, post-apocalyptic future where a new ice age has ravaged Earth, “Quintet” stars Paul Newman as a survivor named Essex who gets drawn into a mysterious game called Quintet after being attacked and nearly killed by a gambler. As Essex finds out, the role-playing game has some deadly consequences —if you’re killed in the game, you’re also murdered in real life. Altman does a great job of sustaining an atmosphere of dreadful unpredictability (though he’s possibly over reliant on smearing the camera lens with vaseline for a gauzy effect), but there are long, quiet, sometimes agonizing stretches where nothing really happens. Costarring a fantastic international cast (Fernando Rey, Vittorio Gassman, Bibi Andersson), “Quintet” is a blip in Altman’s filmography and a precursor to films like “Battle Royale” and “The Hunger Games,” but it’s very far from classic Altman. The movie was released two years after “Star Wars” and the same year as “Alien,” so you can see why genre fans were similarly unresponsive. [C-]