450
PARTISAN REVIEW
The self-advertised seriousness of
Nashville
is a commercial for a
product still to be conceived. The Country-and-Western music capital
is not so much a microcosm of America, as the film pretends to us (the
assassination at the end is an egregious miscalculation), as an occasion
for Altman to reinvent his vision of the culture-that is, to give it the
look and feel of an Altman film. His actors write their own country and
western material, better and worse than the real thing, though clearly
inauthentic. The amplitude of
Nashville-it
has all the signposts of a
big Hollywood film-has to do with its
Grand Hotel
narrative scheme.
The multipllcity of character types and intersecting plots are ·held
together through the device of a BBC interviewer who wanders through
the film's landscape asking inane questions of the stars and whose
fatuousness seems a parody merely of itself.
Nashville
is better than its
worst, but its weaknesses are suggestive of Altman's weaknesses as a
filmmaker. His crassness runs deep. The vision of American life that
informs
Nashville
(and
California Split
and
M"'A"'S"'H
and
The Long
Goodbye),
though perhaps it is less a vision than a series of enlarged
perceptions, is that there is no business but (and like) razzle dazzle
Show Biz.
It
is a vision close enough
to
Kael's own ,for her
to
grant it
almost everything.
Film reviewing, like most jobs, tends
to
justify its own importance
by elevating the consequence of its occasion. Kael has a predilection for
going farther in this direction than most, in part because she wants to
command an audience for the movies that please her. She has a
messianic view of her role that is sometimes attractive, sometimes
maddening. She writes, for example, in her piece on
Day For Night: "I
ask for the extraordinary from films, while Truffaut, who finds
moviemaking itself extraordinary, is often content to make films for
everyday." Apart from the self-congratulation of this remark and the
outright dumbness, one forgets for the moment that Truffaut makes
films-some of them extraordinary-while Kael only writes about
them. I single this remark out unfairly-it is not really characteristic–
to
indicate how self-infatuating reviewing can become when its subject
evolves into the fine calibrations of one's own sensibility.
Popular culture tends to confuse reviewing with criticism, tends to
make more of the seismographic responses of mostly intelligent
laymen than such transient (and often arbitrary) judgments warrant.
The movie reviewer, like the television newscaster, is susceptible of
becoming a celebrity, more important by general consent than his
nominal subject. The feature journalist is the prophet of the immedi–
ate, not so much ahead of fashion as no more than a half step behind.
