A late, minor addition to the Robert Altman collection — but a treasure all the same — A Prairie Home Companion is more likely to inspire fondness than awe. This is entirely appropriate, since the movie snuggles deep into the mood and sensibility of its source, Garrison Keillor's long-running public radio variety show.
Beloved by tote-baggers across the land, Keillor's weekly cavalcade of wry Midwestern humor and musical Americana has never set out to make anyone's hair stand on end. Notwithstanding the occasional crackle of satire or sparkle of instrumental virtuosity, it mostly offers reliable doses of amusement embedded in easygoing nostalgia. It looks back on — or, rather, reinvents — a time when popular culture was spooned out in grange halls and Main Street movie palaces, and when broadcasting was supposedly a local affair sponsored by mom-and-pop purveyors of biscuits and Norwegian pickled herring.
In the film Keillor, who wrote the screenplay and also plays himself (as a jowly, owlish and curiously detached master of ceremonies), supplies the whimsy. Altman, a more cantankerous spirit (he comes from Kansas City, Missouri, a wilder corner of the Midwest than Keillor's Minnesota), brings his unrivaled sense of chaos and his mischievous eye for human eccentricity. Together they have confected a breezy backstage comedy that is also a sly elegy: a poignant contemplation of last things that goes down as smoothly and sweetly as a lemon drop.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SKY DIGI ENTERTAINMENT
The action takes place during the final performance of A Prairie Home Companion, a live radio broadcast that, unlike its real world counterpart, is not made possible by the generous support of listeners like you. Its home station, WLT, has been gobbled up by a Texas-based chain and a corporate heavy, known only as the Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones), has been sent north to shut the program down.
Not everyone involved knows about this — and some who do know don't seem to care — but the show, in any case, goes on. As he has before — in The Company, in Ready to Wear and in Nashville, to name just a few — Altman shuttles his camera gracefully from the wings to the stage, so that you can't always tell where the performance ends and the buzz of regular life begins.
Shooting almost entirely within the Fitzgerald Theater, named for the author F. Scott, in St. Paul, Altman observes the doings of a loose tribe of artists, technicians and hangers-on. The sometime-narrator is Guy Noir (Kevin Kline), a mainstay of the actual Prairie Home Companion here incarnated as a onetime private eye and part-time stage-door security guard. He is the first to notice the presence of a mysterious woman in white (Virginia Madsen), who turns out to be an angel and also the film's literal femme fatale.
As the show rambles through missed cues, heartfelt songs and semi-naughty jokes (courtesy of singing cowboys Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly), we become aware that death, actual and metaphorical, is hovering over the proceedings. Not everyone will survive the evening. Someone will murder a famous murder ballad. Inevitably, the house will go dark, and the players will leave the stage. And in the meantime, a moody young woman (Lindsay Lohan) writes poems about suicide.
The film is, partly, a protest against the smooth, standardized, bottom-line culture represented by the Axeman, and a defiant celebration of imperfection, improvisation and accident. Sometimes you forget a song lyric, your joke falls flat or you scatter the pages of your script all over the floor.
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