1. Robert Altman

This is the first in a series of pieces about films and directors particularly close to my heart.

Robert Altman was the master of the sprawling American epic, the Haydn of the cinematic symphony, and I bloody love him.

Altman’s films are fierce, shivering, skittish thoroughbreds which race like a dream, but kick the groom back in the stable. The Player (1992) is a scabrous, genuinely subversive metasatire of Hollywood, stuffed with knowing celebrity cameos and film noir references: God knows how it got made. Short Cuts (1993), adapted from a collection of Raymond Carver short-stories and winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, is a black, billowing, depressingly funny tapestry of suburban frustrations. Gosford Park, directed when he was 75 for heaven’s sake, is an opulent, baroque, quietly devastating detective tragedy of manners with artful nods to Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (this, Woody, is how you make a film about the English upper class). He also made MASH and McCabe and Mrs Miller (neither of which I’ve seen).

 

Cracking films all, but my favourite of the lot is Nashville (1975), which I only watched for the first time last week. It is an almost absurdly ambitious musical tragicomedy that ululates with every tenor of every emotion under the Tennessee sun. The cast is an army of musicians, aspiring musicians, money men, hangers-on and those caught up in the tempest of egos and anguish, each one as bruised and desperate as the next. Geraldine Chaplin’s plummy, quixotic BBC reporter acts as a guide, of sorts, through the pandemonium of a political rally that has commandeered the cream of the state’s musical talent to champion a populist new Presidential candidate.

It is a long film, sauced with musical interludes: perhaps the most moving of these is the song lothario Tom (Keith Carradine) dedicates to “someone special who might just be here tonight.” As he sings, the camera flits between four admirers, each sweetly (but naively) thinking it’s meant for them, with an ironic, multilayered empathy worthy of Flaubert:

Keith Carradine sings I’m Easy

The film builds and builds, and climaxes with that final scene at the Parthenon, a giddy, Viscontian concerto of panic and disenchantment where everything goes horribly, irrationally, feverishly wrong. Haven Hamilton’s urge for somebody to keep singing while all hell breaks loose shows music as the ornate, but heartbreakingly flimsy paper that won’t quite cover the cracks of the fractured American soul. The whole film is on YouTube, so you have no excuse.

Altman’s influence can be found in all sorts of places today, from Magnolia and Crash to Extras and Downton Abbey. Paul Thomas Anderson, who has the potential to be the greatest film director of all time, is Altman’s mad, Smerdyakovian heir.

Start with Nashville, and see how you get on.