Must be doing something right to last 160 minutes

Less a story or even a proto-“network narrative” than a panoramic portrait of America’s Music City, Nashville was shot in the autumn of 1974, smack-dab in the middle of the New Hollywood decade, that brief golden age when big money flowed for the movie brat mavericks. With the commercial success of M*A*S*H and the creative peak of McCabe and Mrs. Miller still fresh in people’s minds, 1974 should have found Robert Altman at the height of whatever power and influence he’d ever glean, but United Artists turned down the project and Altman wound up making it with ABC. The budget was over $2 million, not exactly peanuts, but we’re talking about a movie with 24 main characters, a steady stream of often elaborate musical performances before huge audiences, a major car accident on the freeway, a public assassination, and god knows how many locations. So the shoot was hurried, cramped and chaotic by most standards. The driver of the truck that cruises through Nashville blasting political speeches was told to just keep trying to invade the production on a daily basis—that was the extent of his direction. Altman tells a story about how he never even saw costumes until he arrived at a location; occasionally he would get a complete stranger, hired (or not) as an extra, to swap outfits with one of his stars. Whether frenzied or fun times, such circumstances were the lifeblood of Altman’s best filmmaking, an aesthetic built on invention, resourcefulness and capricious mischief. Put mics everywhere and keep those cameras rolling: Nashville was made like a documentary. And much of it plays like a great party. 

But here’s what I forgot: while Nashville’s broad satire—‘200 Years,’ the stately anthem that kicks off the movie, is truly the dumbest, most ridiculous but of glitter-country patriotism imaginable—and teeming canvas left little room for sentiment, there comes a moment in the final third or so of its 160-minute runtime when we are suddenly greeted with a handful of scenes of subtle yet devastating emotional impact, most notably when Lily Tomlin’s married, unlikely gospel choir leader has to exit her hotel room tryst with Keith Carradine’s younger, handsome womanizing folk-rocker, and Carradine puts on a show of calling up another woman to take Tomlin’s place, like a guy who’s still got the munchies and needs to order another pizza. The movie ends with real-life singer Ronee Blakley’s fragile singing star—the closest thing to the real thing in Altman’s musical menagerie, she gives a strangely affecting performance—singing a song about her Idaho roots to a huge crowd before some freak pulls out a gun and shoots her for reasons no one really knows. Exiting stage left, Blakley’s taken away, bleeding, unconscious, her fate uncertain. Minutes later the entertainment resumes with Barbara Harris stalking the stage to sing ‘It Don’t Worry Me.’ The gospel choir joins in. The crowd settles down. Kids are held aloft. People look happy again. Maybe they’ll vote for that guy the truck keeps telling them about. The show must go on. And through Altman’s wry gaze that perseverance is neither cynical nor courageous. It’s just the way things are in this place like no other. Crazy shit happens. Might as well keep singing. 

Stop-Loss: Good ol' boys gone bad, courtesy of the red, white and blue

Whisking us from a nail-biting ambush in a Tikrit alleyway to drunken punch-ups deep in the heart of Texas, the first act of Stop-Loss wisely sets a tone of visceral urgency right off the top. For all its emphasis on matters of immediate political import, this is not a film that benefits whatsoever from slowing things down or getting too contemplative. Often awkward in its storytelling yet commendably sincere and suitably messy, Stop-Loss packs a solid emotional whollop even while it dances around an issue at once timely and, perhaps as a result, irresolvable.

A group of pals, first seen singing Toby Keith’s moronically patriotic country anthem in lumbering unison, return home from a tour in Iraq, the whole lot of them destined for a wicked blanket diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Their façade of ass-kicking bravado swiftly slips away to reveal a grotesque grimace of fear and guilt. Their superior actually needs to command them not to beat their wives and kids while on leave –for all the good it does. These good ol’ boys gone bad waste no time going ballistic, ending their celebratory return home by busting up the living room and using the wedding presents given to an already destroyed couple for pissed-up target practice out on the ranch.

Immediately after being awarded a purple heart at the end of what was to be his second and final tour, Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) is unexpectedly ordered to return for a third go-round, bound by a legal loophole referred to as a stop-loss, which allows the US military to send soldiers back in a time of war. King points out that the President already publicly stated that the Iraq War is over, but his insurgent reasoning does him no favours when dealing with shouting jarheads all to aware that the numbers of volunteer enlistees are way, way down. Sent to the stockade to think things over, King soon goes AWOL, hitting the road with his best friend’s girl (Abbie Cornish, superb, an din her quiet way the heart of the movie) in the hope of finding a friendly authority figure who can help him wriggle out of going beyond the call of duty.

Stop-Loss is the fist feature to be directed by Kimberly Pierce since Boys Don’t Cry, her lauded debut from nine years back. Stop-Loss shares its predecessor’s deft handling of regional folk –she neither sentimentalizes or takes pot shots at small town Texans– but its script isn’t nearly as focused. Written by Pierce and Mark Richard, the film fumbles with corny flashbacks, boilerplate dialogue and too many overwrought scenes where the characters, otherwise defined by their inability to articulate their inner turmoil, announce the themes to us rather than evoke them. Yet somehow, these deficiencies never entirely get in the way of the film’s integrity or vigour. There isn’t enough artistry, poetry or perspective here to make this The Deer Hunter for our era, but there is a huge commitment to conveying the raw, fresh wreckage of lives fucked-up by senseless violence, and that’ll do just fine before one comes along.