Paramount Pictures has, I suspect, done Robert Altman a grave disservice in not releasing his Nashville in some longer version…. From an eight-hour version to a six-hour one to be released in two parts, from a three-and-a-half- to its present two-and-a-half-hour version, the film kept shrinking with nothing reaching us except rumors of its decrease…. What has finally been vouchsafed us strikes me as highly interesting but ultimately insufficient….

In a sense, the film resembles Joyce's Ulysses: more or less interconnected, self-important but essentially humdrum lives strutting in a brief time span against the more important backdrop of an exceptionally raucous but second-rate city, and the whole thing functioning on two levels. But there are two sizable differences: the non-literal level in the book is mythic, not merely allegorical; and the novel is a work of genius, the film only of talent.

Still, this is an absorbing film...