Long Time Leaving (33 page)

The other day I was in an Italian grocery in Manhattan. A young woman immigrant from the Middle East was slicing tomatoes too slowly to satisfy the proprietor, who snapped: “Whaddaya think? This is Oshkosh, Tennessee?” There is something of that in Altman's attitude: Nashville, Shmashville. There is also his notion—as he puts it in the directorial commentary on the DVD of the movie—that Nashville “is a microcosm of the Hollywood problem.” This is an excuse for him to fill out his cast of characters with a mélange of L. A.-ish drifter types looking for fame. After
Nashville
came out, the documentarian Ray Farkas made a brief film that captured the sort of obsession that, in fact, draws dreamers to Nashville instead of to Hollywood: it seemed that every third Nashvillian he met, beginning with the rent-a-car lady in the airport, had a song that he or she had written and was happy to sing, badly, for Farkas's camera.

These days, creative Nashville may indeed think of itself as a microcosm of Hollywood, but what that amounts to is road-show Hollywood, a contradiction in terms. For Altman, generally, “the Hollywood problem” has been how to finagle financing for one of his sometimes inspired, sometimes impenetrable pipe dreams.
The Nashville Chronicles
(by Jan Stuart) traces, about as clearly as possible I guess, how Altman managed to parlay United Artists’ urging him to direct a country-music vehicle for Tom Jones (based on a script called
The Great Southern Amusement Company,
which Altman disdained), and some intermediate mogul-schmoozing after a John Denver concert, into a deal with ABC to direct his scattershot vision of the midseventies American zeitgeist.

In his DVD commentary, Altman readily admits that he knew nothing about Nashville or country music and that his screenwriter Joan Tewkes-bury didn't either, except what she picked up in two atmosphere-gathering visits. He keeps insisting, however, on the movie's “realism”— for instance, when one of the actors playing a singer got a frog in her throat in the middle of a song, they left that in. Altman didn't want to deal with record companies (understandably), so his actors wrote their own songs. Carradine's are catchy, but they don't smack at all of Nashville or of Jerry Jeff “Walker, the hell-raising outlaw-country icon who supposedly inspired his character. (Carradine seems to spend most of his time lounging around. Jerry Jeff devoted the seventies to staying up.) Henry Gibson's songs are droll, as is his performance as a Hank Snow sort of fella, but they aren't as country-funny as Snow's explanation of
why he wouldn't go to the movie: “I have better things to do than to go see a movie where somebody's supposed to be playing me…. And I'm not pompous at all. I'm just a quiet, bashful country boy.”

When Vassar Clements appears on the screen, Altman in his DVD voice-over commentary identifies him as “a great jazz violinist.” No, he's a great country fiddle player.
^*
As is Johnny Gimble, who pops up a couple of times gamely trying to play along with whatever the hell is going on, and who isn't even mentioned in the credits. Johnny Gimble is a man who has played and hung out with, and can tell you great stories about, Bob Wills and Willie Nelson—and who also played, in the kitchen at night, with Anne Rapp's daddy. Altman's recent movies from scripts by Anne Rapp,
Cookie's Fortune
and the underrated
Dr. T and the Women,
capture aspects of Southern culture well and freshly, and his
Gingerbread Man
gets old Savannah down a lot better than Clint Eastwood's hokey movie version of
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
But in
Nashville
he was shooting for something wiggier.

He was after making some kind of grand political point that, as a British reviewer of
Nashville
put it snottily, “looks stuck in for a significance that it could never have in a place so traumatized by its self-importance that minutes after gunshots have left a bloodied body onstage the townsfolk are nodding and clapping again in time to their staple industry.” This is really infuriating, because that indifference to reality seems to
be
Altman's theme, when, in fact, it is a matter of his own indifference. If
Nashville
were interestingly
critical
of Southerners, I'd be downright flattered. What offends me is that
Nashville
doesn't recognize us, or our music, as any particular kind of people or music at all, other than fodder for Altman.

The supposed Loretta Lynn character breaks down while singing at Opryland, and her audience responds by groaning nastily. “Those are the faces of the audience,” says Altman on the CD. “You can go there today and that's what you'll see.” We learn from Stuart's book that a number of the extras portraying this audience were from a convention of Shriners that happened to be in town, who kept drunkenly interfering with the shooting. Any realistic country music audience witnessing anybody as beloved as Loretta Lynn breaking down would respond, as Greil Marcus has written, “with sympathy, compassion and fear.”

Then, in the final, climactic scene of the movie, the one alluded to

by the British reviewer, this same character is shot by an uninterestingly unmotivated assassin, and her audience responds by singing over and over the refrain of a catchy but far from even contemporary country song written by Carradine, “You may say that I ain't free. Well, it don't worry me.”

The production had gathered a big crowd at Centennial Park by advertising ten-cent hot dogs and, more significantly, a chance to be in a movie. That's what I came for. I don't know that I even got a hot dog. I happened to be in Nashville at the time (covering a Protestant ministers’ golf tournament), and some friends and I joined the multitude. We saw an actress get shot a couple of times, and then all we were directed to do was sing along, for over an hour, with this mindless ditty. What were we going to do, act? I tell you what, if it had been Loretta Lynn shot, we wouldn't have been nodding and clapping. We would have been weeping and looking to kill the son of a bitch. But since it was a movie, we were smiling and playing along with whatever the gag was.

“We couldn't stage this,” says Altman on the DVD. “So that's the …the faces of Nashville.”

It was the faces of Nashville trying to be helpful to the Hollywood folks, is what it was. At one point, the camera passed through us and the resultant crush knocked an elderly woman next to me off her feet. “Wait a minute,” I said, “this lady's about to get trampled!”

“Don't stop 'em,” she said from the ground, her eyes alight. Maybe that was a microcosm of Hollywood, but was it art?

No, I am not visible in the movie. If there's anything I hate, it's being accused of hating a movie because I got cut out of it.

W
hat I enjoy talking about most, I'd say, is movies. That's how far I have gotten away from my raising. Last Christmas night, I was in New York City, with mostly Northern people, doing what? Praying? Caroling? No, watching a DVD of
Closer,
a critically acclaimed movie about extremely chic and trashy people. Let me say this for us, though: we all hated it. Any movie so sour and mean that it manages to render Natalie Portman unappealing is not the kind of thing I was

brought up to like, nor have I learned to like it later. The Yuletide air was filled with cries of “Soullllll-dead!” and “Lacks emotional depth!”

Closer
is set in London. Judging by this movie, people in London will pretty much have sex with anybody they meet who looks like a movie star, even when they look like movie stars themselves. And the tragedy of it is, they don't seem to get much of a bang out of it, even when they look like Julia Roberts, who is from my home state of Georgia! One thing about movies set in the South, people tend to break a sweat in them, and that includes Julia Roberts. In
Something to Talk About,
which a lot of people didn't like but I did, she brought up adultery at the Junior League, poisoned her husband (Dennis Quaid, Texas) to within an inch of his life, and then later fast-danced with him, good and hard and nifty, like back in high school. And I believe all that was supposed to be taking place no farther south than Kentucky.

Hey, I know! How about a Down Memory Lane Southern Film Festival!

Remember when heavy-handed Dixie-bashing was Hollywood courage? Return with me now to 1967 and the worst high-minded race-relations melodrama of all time:
Hurry Sundown,
directed by Otto Pre-minger, with Michael Caine and Jane Fonda as miserably degenerate upper-Louisiana gentry (he defiles her when she fondles his saxophone) and Robert Hooks and Diahann Carroll as noble, if colorless, persons of color.
Hurry Sundown
was so startlingly bad, wrote Wilfrid Sheed, that “to criticize it would be like tripping a dwarf.” And yet an Australian reviewer named Peter Thompson looks back upon
Hurry Sundown
now as “a landmark film, one which set a precedent for later examination of racial issues.” According to Thompson, the film is

So if you are chatting with an Australian cinephile, and you happen to mention that you are from Alabama, and the response is, “Oh, yes, that town in Georgia up the Mississippi from Louisiana that tried to obstruct the humanitarian vision of Otto Preminger,” blame it on Thompson.

In our festival, let's chase that turkey with an unpretentious 1992 comedy,
My Cousin Vinny,
that actually makes Southern justice look amicable. Fred Gwynne plays a well-educated, judicious judge, and even the sheriff (Bruce McGill) is a man of goodwill. Vinny (Joe Pesci) comes from Brooklyn to a small town in the Deep South to represent his young cousin (Ralph Macchio), who's being tried for a murder he seems to have confessed to because of interregional linguistic confusion. Vinny is accompanied by his girlfriend, Mona Lisa Vito, fetchingly played by Marisa Tomei. More interregional confusion arises. (“What is a grit?” asks Pesci at breakfast. “What is a ‘yoot’?” asks the judge, nonplussed by Vinny's pronunciation of “youth.”) Grits, and how to cook them, play a key evidentiary role in the trial. In fact, the whole movie is a tribute to the universality of hard evidence. The intergenderal arguments between Vinny and Mona Lisa are delightfully rooted in, to quote Mona Lisa (who grew up in a family of garage mechanics), “dead-on balls accurate” definitions of terms. Okay, it's a fantasy.

Speaking of relationships, how about a double feature of
Summer and Smoke
(1961) followed by
Girls! Girls! Girls!
(1962). In the former, set in early twentieth-century Mississippi, Geraldine Page is an outwardly pious preacher's daughter named Alma who inwardly teems with desire for local rakehell Laurence Harvey, who finally gives her a highly ungratifying semitumble (he prefers, as who wouldn't, handy spitfire Rita Moreno). In the latter, Elvis, a tuna-fishing guide, is pursued by lots of such people as are mentioned in the title, though his heart is on the ocean among gills, gills, gills. (He does not sing “Tuna! Tuna! Tuna!” however, but “Song of the Shrimp.”) Of
Summer and Smoke,
Pauline Kael wrote, “There's supposed to be something on fire inside Alma…, but …'taint smoke that rises—just wispy little old tired ideas goin’ to rejoin the Holy Ghost.” Imagine my surprise, then, to learn from the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) that there is a reference to
Summer and Smoke in Girls! Girls! Girls!
Does Elvis put off insensitive club chanteuse Stella Stevens by singing, “Oh, yeah, you're hot, girl, you couldn't be any faster. But I'll tell you what you're not, girl: the daughter of a pastor”? There's only one way to find out.

I never tire of being weirded all the way back to Sunday school by arrant evildoer Robert Mitchum singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” in
Night of the Hunter.
Let's follow that with
The Apostle,
a holistic portrait of an earnest, adulterous, violent-when-cuckolded, engaging, genuinely religious rogue preacher. Robert Duvall wrote it, directed it, and played the preacher. (With Texan Farrah Fawcett as his wife, June

Carter Cash as “Mrs. ‘Momma’ Dewey Sr.,” and Billy Joe Shaver in a bit part.) I watched this with Pauline Kael, who said afterward, “The son of a bitch pulled it off.”

Another double feature:
Tomorrow,
a poignant Faulkner story adapted by Horton Foote and starring Duvall. Followed by Billy Bob Thornton in
Sling Blade
(this one made Pauline shudder—to me it's hokum, but enjoyable), in which Duvall appears and Thornton adapts the mentally challenged mumble that Duvall used in
Tomorrow.
It used to be in movies that a grit accent was a way of showing dumbness or meanness. With Billy Bob's voices in various roles, you get real texture.

In
Mildred Pierce
(1945) Zachary Scott plays a quintessentially shallow slimy-rat playboy (“With me, loafing is a science”) who dies like an egg-sucking dog, deservedly. Why show that? So we can follow it with Scott's startling departure in his very next film: Renoir's best American movie,
The Southerner,
in which Scott (a native of Austin, Texas) loses the pencil-thin mustache and gets his hands affectingly earthy as a hard-scrabble farmer.

Laura Dern as the innocent sexpot (opposite daddy-figure Duvall) in
Rambling Rose
might be set off nicely by Ashley Judd (is she not fine?) as a luminous innocent in
Ruby in Paradise.

Two movies about children and tough love:
The Yearling,
in which careworn Jane Wyman is pitted against her boy's beloved garden-raiding fawn, and
Conrack,
in which Jon Voight is the young Pat Conroy getting some learning into unruly rural schoolkids. (With Conroy's bullying father, played by Duvall in
The Great Santini,
lurking in the subtext.) Program note: Voight has played a number of Southern characters well despite being from Yonkers. Incidentally he has also portrayed Noah, FDR, and Howard Cosell; he's the father of Angelina Jolie, hence Thornton's father-in-law; and his brother, under the name of Chip Taylor, wrote the Troggs’ immortal hit “Wild Thing.”