In one scene, Lily Tomlin and Keith Carradine have just had sex. (A tape of him singing plays on his tape recorder: This seems to be a seduction technique of his -- he's purveying his self-regard.) In bed, relaxing, he has her show him how to say "I love you" in American Sign Language. She smiles happily, then realizes it's getting late. She straightens her hair and pulls on her clothes, sizing up the damage in a bathroom mirror. Carradine is stung -- we've seen him with a number of other women, but he's opened up only with her. You can see him thinking: "People don't leave me. I leave them."

He retaliates by dialing up an old girlfriend, working his charm on her and offering to bring her to Nashville in full hearing of Lily. Almost imperceptibly, Lily -- a straitlaced mother and wife who has probably never before cheated on her husband -- registers how childish and selfish the man she's just had sex with is; she also registers how badly she must have needed this tumble. She waves goodbye briskly and leaves wearing a different smile than the one she wore in bed; Carradine ends his phone conversation abruptly. He can make any woman in a club think he's singing a song for her alone, but here, now, he's frustrated and disconsolate.

With its profusion of wires, recording and communication devices, its mirrors and reflections and its concern with language, playacting, time and revelation, this brief scene is more complex than anything I can think of in the work of intellectual gameplayer-directors like Peter Greenaway. Yet the complicatedness isn't made much of. We just take in the environment and the characters and what they're going through. For Altman, this kind of thing happens to all of us, all the time. Signals get crossed, unwanted frequencies come wafting in, reflections we'd rather avoid bounce back at us, ghosts from the past sweep us up and then drop us, and when one thing comes into focus another falls out.

"I'm looking for surprises," Altman said to a reporter at the time of "Nashville." "If we had just taken what was in my head and put that vision on film, it would have been a pretty lousy movie. Or at least very, very ordinary. One head, no matter how good -- well, it just can't be the same as everyone bringing something to it." Over his career, Altman developed a variety of techniques to allow for inclusiveness. The sound systems he developed with the sound engineers Jim Webb and Chris McLaughlin let him record and present more ambient and minor-character noise than we'd been used to. With his cinematographers -- during this period, usually Vilmos Zsigmond and, here, Paul Lohmann -- Altman used multiple cameras and lighted entire environments, not just individual shots. This gave his actors an unusual freedom of movement; it also meant that, since they often didn't know from which direction they were being filmed, or which angle was likely to be used in the final cut, they couldn't play to a camera.

Altman often has his actors fill out their characters with their own substance. Blakley, for instance, actually was once burned by a fire baton. An actress might choose her own wardrobe and write her own dialogue; the structure that Altman's screenwriter, Joan Tewkesbury, worked out allowed for a great deal of improvisation. The actor's rapport with his role becomes what we recognize as the character. Here, many of the performers playing singers wrote or co-wrote their own songs. (That's how Keith Carradine got his Oscar.) There's always a mixture of real and not-real in what we watch in a fiction movie. Some filmmakers take this to be a problem, and put all their energy into strong-arming you to believe in the fiction they're presenting. For Altman, a desire to believe is basic to human nature. It doesn't need goosing, just inviting. And, yes, what we're watching is both real and not-real. Why not invite both to the party?

He works by crosscutting and parallel action, by implication and suggestion. One of his distinctive camera techniques is to move the cameras and have them zoom at the same time. Cameras in motion add depth to an image. They're generally used to heighten involvement; they invite us into roundedness and mass. Zooms flatten the image out. They're usually used to heighten tension: The bomb is in the trunk, the microfilm was left in this drawer. The way Altman combines the two cuts us loose from our lock on the conventional subject, and frees us to rove through the entire image at our own rate. The camera work (like the soundtrack) seems elastic, submarine. It has a Japanese-screen effect; we move back and forth between losing ourselves in abstraction and pattern, and seizing on the concrete and specific.

When he does zoom to pick something out, it's usually a character trying to decide what response is appropriate. He's drawn to moments when you can't figure out how to take things. Altman has his actors reacting to more than they can keep track of. Part of the fun is in watching them try to puzzle their way through a moment. "Truth" for Altman, as for many people in the performing arts, often seems to be what happens when a performance is working. (The one bad performance in "Nashville" is Allen Garfield's; he overdoes the sleazy pushiness. While everyone else is fitting in, he's doing his best to stand out.) Perhaps the film's funniest moment comes when Blakley is singing on an outdoor stage that's a mockup of a paddle wheeler. She sings beautifully to a relaxed, rapt crowd. Scott Glenn plays a soldier who's infatuated with Blakley, and he's staring at her and listening to her, agog. Geraldine Chaplin pushes her microphone in front of him and asks if he's been to Vietnam. He doesn't respond; he's too caught up in Blakley's singing. "Oh," says Chaplin, empathizing wildly, "I can see that you have been." She's incapable of realizing that there's magic happening on the stage before her.

Henry Gibson is spectacular as the viciously competitive Haven Hamilton. He's an imperious cornpone cynic, a virtuoso of sanctimonious boilerplate constantly making appreciative reference to "this business that's been so kind to me." He makes his toupee and girdle seem major statements. But it's with the actresses that Altman shows his best stuff. Watching some movies, you get the feeling that the director is having a sexual exchange with his actresses, and that the film captures a pulsing, we're-breathing-each-other's-breath quality. You sometimes see this when D.W. Griffith directs Lillian Gish, Bergman directs Bibi Andersson or when François Truffaut directs Jeanne Moreau.

Now playing: Read all the recent movie reviews by Salon's critics