"Only time I ever went hog-wild... around the bend... was for the Kennedy boys. But they were different."
In a way, Robert Altman's Nashville is a bookend to 1970's M*A*S*H, which addressed the country's misgivings about Vietnam behind the smokescreen of the Korean War and a madcap mobile surgical unit operating in Southeast Asia. While the city of Nashville is a much smaller canvas, it stands in for a more expansive concept, contemporary America at its Bicentennial. The memorable cast of characters—sycophantic lawyer Delbert Reese (Ned Beatty), womanizing folk singer Tom Frank (Keith Carradine), Napoleonic country star Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson)—rival those of M*A*S*H in terms of eccentricities and surpass them in number. They form a microcosm of the country after the disillusionment of Watergate, the collapse of the idealism of the 60s, the assassinations that marked that era, a satirical apotheosis of all of the critiques Altman and screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr. first lobbed at the country in M*A*S*H.
