One feels, and before Nashville it seemed a very grave limit, that Altman is in love with surfaces, that style is the essence of his work. And that if his dominant vision is that human life is absurd and fragmented, it is merely a shallow intuition, not deeply felt or thought through. Altman is hip and cynical, but his detachment is of that comfortable variety which often passes for iconoclasm and radicalism in American film. Altman's world is one where dreamers are destroyed (Brewster McCloud), friends betray and murder (The Long Goodbye), and every relationship is tainted by money (McCabe and Mrs Miller). But for all this sense of human corruption, his films gave off little genuine pain. The sum of his perceptions was that since everything is meaningless, you can only survive by being cool, mocking, and uncommitted. (pp. 97-8)

In Nashville, Altman can again be faulted...