As a movie critic, the query I get requested greater than some other is, “What’s your favourite film?” For many years, I’ve given the identical reply. However within the final 10 years or so, after I say, “My favourite film is ‘Nashville,’” I all the time must surprise if the particular person I’m speaking to has even heard of it. Many haven’t. A handful have heard of it in an “Oh, yeah, proper” type of manner. The remaining, a definite minority, know simply what I’m speaking about. I can all the time inform by the look in somebody’s eye after I’ve stumbled upon a fellow “Nashville” believer.

I first noticed Robert Altman’s teeming, sprawling, exultant, tragic, transporting masterpiece, which got here out 50 years in the past this summer time (the discharge date was June 11, 1975), after I was a freshman in faculty. The movie had an impact on me that’s exhausting to explain. I didn’t simply fall in love with it. I didn’t simply turn out to be obsessive about it. The tumultuous great thing about “Nashville” hit me so exhausting that the film reshaped my identification. I used to be like a boomer who had simply seen the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan” and had now seen the sunshine.

For the subsequent six months, I by no means stopped enthusiastic about “Nashville.” I daydreamed about it. I meditated on it and lived inside it. The movie actually took over my creativeness. And that course of created in me an odd feeling of religion. As a result of what “Nashville” confirmed me — fully, and for the primary time — was the world I used to be residing in. The film made me notice that I cherished America, and it additionally made me notice that America was a spot the place the middle was not holding. This raised a tantalizing conundrum: How may I be falling so exhausting for a world that was falling aside?

In “Nashville,” we spend 2 hours and 40 minutes following 24 characters as they wander by way of the country-music capital over a interval of 5 days, the randomness of their encounters turning into drama earlier than your eyes. You are feeling such as you’re seeing a documentary; all of it seems to be and appears “actual.” Nevertheless it’s not! That’s the Altman magic. He was like a fusion of James Joyce and D.A Pennebaker, a filmmaker who immersed you within the scruffy 3D effusiveness of each second. “Nashville” has the pull of a cleaning soap opera crossed with the glory of a musical crossed with the primal energy of actuality.

I used to be a youngster within the Nineteen Seventies, an period that’s romanticized now, and for good purpose (there was a number of freedom, a number of ardour, a number of nice music, a number of pinball). However there was a bizarre non secular waywardness to that point. As a tradition, we not believed within the healthful suburban dream of the ’50s. We not believed within the hippie dream of the ’60s. The moon touchdown was a sci-fi dream that, inside 5 minutes, got here to really feel like a rerun. The period was full of faux religions (EST! alien guests! Lou Reed’s solo albums!), and as every of these items allow you to down, you had been left with a haunting query: Was there something left that united America?

After I watched “Nashville,” which I did over and over (within the pre-VHS period — I noticed it in school movie societies and rep theaters), what it confirmed me is that America was not a lot a melting pot as an epic casserole that didn’t fairly gel. Everybody talked previous one another, and life was turning into ever extra scattered and random — a notion constructed into the very type of Altman’s film. (That’s the essence of its genius.) I don’t suppose it’s an excessive amount of of a stretch to say that Altman, in 1975, foresaw the Web age, in addition to the period we’re in now: an America that’s fractured, splintered, atomized, balkanized, separated from itself. What “Nashville” exhibits us is the nice American crack-up. But when Ronee Blakley, because the nation star Barbara Jean, will get up onstage on the Opry Belle to sing “Tapedeck in His Tractor” and “Dues,” it’s one of the transcendent sequences within the historical past of cinema. For a couple of heartbreakingly blissful moments, the down-home incandescence of her efficiency appears to drag the world of America collectively, giving us all a determined purpose to imagine.