I sat down to watch Robert Altman’s Nashville nearly 12 years to the day that I was presented, by my well-meaning mother, with a second-hand copy of Reeling by Pauline Kael. The fact is that her review of Nashville was the first selection I read after searching out (and being somewhat disappointed by) her take on Jaws. Jaws was, and still is, my favorite movie ever. (Sorry, Sans soleil. It was a photo finish.) For Kael to devote perhaps five paragraphs to it seemed miserly. Of course, at that time, I didn’t understand that she was paying Jaws a mighty compliment when she wrote that it “represented what Eisenstein might have done if he hadn’t intellectualized himself out of reach.” Did this actually mean that this Eisenstein fellow had previously cornered the market on movies about man-eating sharks before losing his way? At 12 years old, I considered myself movie-literate — I forced all my junior high school friends to watch Dead Ringers, which they declaimed as “boring,” and The Machurian Candidate, which nobody ended up sitting through — but Kael’s book was terrifically intimidating. Not only was Jaws the only movie in there that I was sure I’d actually seen, but it was apparently only one-eighth as worthy of discussion as this Nashville thing, the analysis which took up something like six pages.

Most of my film critic friends don’t like Pauline Kael, and I think I know why: she reviewed straight from the gut. She based her observations on the pleasure principle, and if a movie didn’t provide pleasure (if it was, as she implied of Eisenstein’s later work, “intellectualized”) her guard went up. And then, it wasn’t such a far trip from wariness (a good critical virtue) to flat-out hostility (not so good). Re-reading her reviews of films I admire very much, such as Barry Lyndon or Don’t Look Now or Raging Bull or Lone Star, is doubly frustrating. Obviously, it’s frustrating because I believe, a lot of the time, that she’s completely wrong. She rarely cut films any slack for trying to “say something” (thank God she didn’t live to see Dogville), but it annoyed me that she sometimes refused to see things for what they were: that the Olympian sense of distance informing Barry Lyndon was thematically apt rather than indicative of an out-of-touch artist, or that the dire, head-against-a-stone-wall unpleasantness of Raging Bull was precisely and properly the source of its power.

But the hell of it is that a lot of the time — more often than not, in fact — she’s astonishingly lucid. Her championing of films like Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Walter Hill’s The Warriors — films I felt a strong, overwhelming connection to in my childhood and adolescence — makes perfect sense to me. And not only do I feel she’s right to admire them, but the manner in which she frames their virtues — her observations about Donald Sutherland’s inspired spookiness, or the way The Warriors functions as “visual rock” — is itself a source of perfection.

Kael was a big Robert Altman fan, although not without reservations — reviewing Brewster McCloud, she opened by stating that given his established pattern of following disasters with masterpieces, she couldn’t wait for his next movie. There are some Altman films I’ve viewed, or re-viewed, in recent years that I like very much — M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Short Cuts. But I’ve never been properly enthusiastic about his work, and when older colleagues get misty eyed over Three Women or California Split, I can’t relate and slink away. This may be because other films I saw during my formative film-going years, like John Sayles’s City of Hope or P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights, appropriated certain elements of Altman’s work, so that by the time I returned to the source, it seemed unimpressive. (An experiment in cultural osmosis: try showing a younger cousin or relative 2001: A Space Odyssey. They’ve already seen the greatest hits on The Simpsons and will tell you so.)

And, even though I recognize now in my mid-twenties that City of Hope is strident, well-intentioned pap, and P.T. Anderson is every bit the smoke-and-mirrors huckster his first two initials suggest, I had a similarly muted reaction to Nashville. Despite this assignment’s imperatives — watch a film you’ve never watched, objectively — I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t because there was a plethora of Nashville parodies — none come to mind — but because I was so familiar with Kael’s review that the film felt like little more than a series of diagrams illustrating the points I knew word for word. I was silently mouthing Kael’s statement that Nashville was the “funniest epic vision of America ever to reach the screen” even as I popped the disc in my DVD player and thus found said vision to be a largely unfulfilling experience, even as it fulfilled every one of my expectations.

I expected it to unfold across a broad canvas of characters and yet possess a specificity of milieu and a unity of theme: check. I expected the dialogue to tumble sidelong in different directions while I wished for 5.1 channels of sound in my apartment: that happened, too. Mostly, I expected to be underwhelmed by Altman’s typically schematized stabs at sociology. And I was: Nashville is a simplistic thesis statement (America is a wobbly wonderland) in the guise of a loose-limbed hangout movie. It’s obviously the loose-limbed hangy-outness of the enterprise that appealed to the voracious sensualist in Kael, but while I can appreciate many of the performances (why Ronee Blakely never did anything else worth a damn is beyond me), I found Altman’s endless indulgence of his actors and their various improvisations more sloppy than revelatory.

My job affords me the happy opportunity to generate glib philosophical exegesis about the phallic connotations of Doom (in which the Rock appears to be portaging his canoe-sized firearm): engaging with first-run crap for fun and profit. It’s expanding on narrowness, and it’s exhausting, but the depth and breadth of Nashville somehow didn’t constitute a come-on in contrast. Instead, I felt boxed in by my own painstakingly accrued critical frame of reference. Nothing is more frustrating for a critic than the feeling that what he has to say is ultimately superfluous: I felt as if I was losing my nerve — as if I were being cowed by the words of a critic who incites my ire at least as frequently as she elicits my admiration.

A couple of weeks after the fact, I still haven’t reconciled my feelings about Kael (and I doubt I ever will) but I’m pretty sure that my non-committal response to Altman’s alleged masterpiece is the correct one. It may seem miserly to react with indifference towards a film suffused with such obvious fervor, but for a film so packed with dialogue and concerned with performance, media, and message, Nashville is to my ears uncommunicative, a pageant whose players, however vividly sketched, are subordinate to its grand but ungainly design. I prefer 1975’s other funny, epic vision of America: the one about the brave and quirky Everymen who must circumvent a corrupt, buck-passing local despot before selflessly putting their lives on the line to uphold the sanctity and safety of their idyllic, pursuit-of-happiness community. I speak, of course, of Jaws. How odd that an assignment to write about a film I’d never seen turns into a paean to the one movie I’ve viewed more often than any other — and will doubtlessly see repeatedly long before Nashville enters my thoughts unsolicited again.