The funniest epic vision of America ever to reach the screen. Robert Altman’s movie is at once a Grand Hotel-style narrative, with 24 linked characters; a country-and-Western musical; a documentary essay on Nashville and American life; a meditation on the love affair between performers and audiences; and an Altman party. In the opening sequences, when Altman’s people—the performers we associate with him because he has used them in ways no one else would think of, and they’ve been filtered through his sensibility—start arriving, and pile up in a traffic jam on the way from the airport to the city, the movie suggests the circus procession at the non-ending of 81/2. But Altman’s clowns are far more autonomous; they move and intermingle freely, and the whole movie is their procession.