#59 - Nashville

If you can see in the poster, the tagline for this movie was, "The d*mndest thing you ever saw." That's pretty accurate. 24 intertwined characters spend a long weekend in the Music City in a movie that clocks in at 2 hours, 40 minutes (par-for-the-course with AFI). Twenty-four main characters to keep track of for almost three hours. Let that sink in.

A movie that barely leaves you time to breathe, 1975's "Nashville" is so ground-breaking because of its ensemble cast of bright stars, all with connections keeping them together to the central action. It could be argued that this movie invented the format that led to such films as "Crash," "Babel," and even the more-recent "Valentine's Day."

There is no main, central character, but the character the audience most relies upon is a BBC reporter named Opal who is filming a documentary of the weekend. Played by Geraldine Chaplin (the first daughter of Charlie Chaplin), she asks the questions the audience wants to know. As an outsider to the country music industry, she allows the audience to get to the heart of the matter without wasting much time.

Every level of stardom is represented in the film: the young superstar, the aging classic, the young glamour-girl, the modestly popular folk-rock trio, the tone-deaf singer looking for her big break, et cetera ad nauseum .......

I thought the movie would be hard to follow with so many characters and plotlines, but it was surprisingly easy to sort everyone into categories and relationships they shared ("Oh, she's married to him," "He sings with him," etc.) The character that keeps it all together is known as the Tricycle Man (Jeff Goldblum!) who is actually never seen up close -- just driving around Nashville, bridging the gaps between day and night. The movie has a definite pace; Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and finally Tuesday seem to fly by. The movie was definitely a quick watch, despite being almost three hours long. I think this can be explained by the vast amount of characters -- there was always something going on.

On the whole, "Nashville" was an interesting portrayal of Southern American life in the mid-1970s. You can almost feel the heat of the Tennessee sun in some of the scenes (especially the car-crash scene, which brought everyone together), and I think this element of "you're-really-there" is the movie's strongest suit.