[Nashville is] a bloated, slapdash, simplistic effort, full of hollow attitudinizing about the Emptiness of American Life, an enterprise concocted of equal parts arrogance, condescension, and gall….

Some say you have to be stoned to see Altman's films properly, and I suspect they're right. The director's best movies (M∗A∗S∗H, California Split) and his worst (Thieves Like Us, Brewster McCloud) are marked by faintly narcotic stylistic similarities—muzzy, soft-edged camerawork, mumbly, overlapping dialogue tracks, limp, somnambulant pacing. Altman has drawn an analogy between how he makes a movie and the way jazzmen improvise. Journalists have bought this one, but the analogy is faulty. True, jazz musicians improvise within the harmonies of a song's structure, but their work remains abstract, consisting of sounds and moods. Altman's work is moody all right, but essentially mindless; language and ideas cannot be manipulated as freely as musical tones. The director's...