Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Nashville

From Altman to Alt-Film

For a moviegoer, Nashville is no Nashville

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

It's hard to think about Nashville and movies without thinking of the movie Nashville. After all, how many cities have one of the Greatest Films of All Time named after them? (Casablanca, of course, and possibly Rome if you're partial to Rome, Open City, but that still puts Nashville in pretty limited company.)

If you revisit Robert Altman's epic satire after a visit to modern-day Nashville, as I did recently, you can't help noting how dated the 1975 movie feels. It's not just that the city is very different now (the film's glimpses of old, grimy lower Broadway are a nice historical document), but that the whole sour tone of Altman's treatise seems off.

The movie uses Nashville as a gaudy pincushion for Altman and screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury's sharp jabs at American sentimentality and hypocrisy. Almost everyone in the film is pathetic and delusional, from the egotistical country music stars to the sad hangers-on. The characters are shallow, the music is shallow, even the political activism exemplified by a shadowy third-party candidate is shallow. Nashville was part of a rush of ironic post-Vietnam, post-Watergate Bicentennial art—the movie begins with one of the characters recording a truly awful song with the chorus, "We must be doing something right to last 200 years." Altman set up Nashville the city as a straw man, the last bastion of callow, self-congratulatory Americanism. (Too bad he never made it to Pigeon Forge...) The movie isn't so much unfair as it is cruelly unforgiving.

One major difference between the city Altman imagined in 1975 and the one you can visit in 2002 is that you're now more likely to see a movie like Nashville there than to find yourself in anything that resembles it. True, Nashville is still no mecca for either moviegoers or filmmakers, but film buffs there report that it has gotten significantly better in recent years.

On the megaplex level, Nashville was a Carmike-dominated town until sometime in the 1990s, when Regal decided to horn in. The Knoxville-based (well, formerly Knoxville-based) chain opened two giant cineramas, including the staggering Hollywood 27. With, you guessed it, 27 screens, it's reportedly one of the largest-grossing theaters in the country.

Of course, we all know more screens doesn't equal more or better movies—it mostly means Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings showing at 15-minute intervals. But, as in Knoxville, the excess capacity has led Regal to devote a handful of screens to foreign and indie films. At Regal's 16-screen Green Hills Cinema last week, for example, high-profile highbrow fare like Gosford Park (Robert Altman's latest) and In the Bedroom sit side-by-side with box office fodder like Ocean's 11 and Kung Pow.

Regal has been prodded somewhat into that arena by Nashville's true cinematic gem, the Belcourt Theatre in the Hillsboro Village area. The 1920s-era building, originally a vaudeville venue and briefly the home of the Grand Ol' Opry, was in danger of demolition a few years back and was rescued by a grassroots organization called Belcourt Yes! The non-profit group now owns and runs the two-screen theater, showing a combination of fringier art films (the stuff Regal is scared of, in other words) and classics. Last weekend, it featured the acclaimed indie features Donnie Darko and Fat Girl, plus the Bogart-Bacall favorite The Big Sleep. Revival series have included weeks devoted to film noir, great leading men and women, and musicals.

"There's a very eclectic mix of people who flow through Hillsboro Village," says Shawn Shepherd, the Belcourt's booker and projectionist. "It helps that there's a few local taverns and restaurants here, the university [Vanderbilt] nearby. It's also close to Music Row. It's pretty good mix of young and old, men and women."

The Belcourt augments its business with a regular schedule of live music, including acts like bluegrass belter Rhonda Vincent, moody indie trio Low and a little rock outfit called Superdrag. (For more information on the Belcourt, including current offerings, visit the website at www.belcourt.org.)

For even more diverse fare, the Sarratt Cinema on the Vanderbilt campus collaborates with a group called Nashville Premieres to bring new and/or rereleased films for short engagements. Most recently, the Sarratt featured a new print of Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 crime caper deconstruction Band of Outsiders. And the Watkins Film School at the city's recently relocated Watkins College of Art and Design hosts regular free Friday night video screenings of cult and classic movies like Hiroshima, Mon Amour.

Once a year, the Nashville Independent Film Festival brings a week's worth of innovative cinema to town. Now in its 33rd year, NIFF is one of the oldest indie fests in the country. In recent years, it has expanded its slate and its audience considerably, setting up camp at Regal's Green Hills Cinema and drawing cumulative audiences in the thousands. It looks to continue that trend under new executive director Brian Gordon, who came to Nashville after years of experience with film fests in San Francisco. This year's NIFF is scheduled for the first week of June. Visit the website at www.nashvillefilmfestival.org.

Also, for those who are into that sort of thing, Nashville has some of the finest film criticism in the country courtesy of the writers at the weekly Nashville Scene. The Scene's lead critic, Jim Ridley, has won multiple awards for his thoughtful and sharp-witted commentary. You can read him at www.nashvillescene.com.

Finally, while Music City will never be mistaken for Hollywood, it has been visited by a sizable handful of film crews over the past few years. Most notably, the Tom Hanks prison saga The Green Mile and the Robert Redford prison saga The Last Castle were both filmed at the abandoned state penitentiary on the west side of town. The prison is attractive to film crews for the same reasons it was eventually shut down by the state: it's a brooding, gothic hellhole.

In Altman's Nashville, one of the running jokes is that the insular, self-absorbed characters don't know much about the rest of the country or culture. When Elliott Gould and Julie Christie show up in cameos as themselves, the country music stars who greet them are a little unsure who these Hollywood folk are (of course, the Hollywooders are just as clueless in the other direction). If that kind of provincialism were ever a reality, it's a safe bet it's not anymore. Of course, these days, they'd all be under contract to the same giant media conglomerate. But that's another story...