Robert Altman's Last Radio Show

A Prairie Home Companion

rating: 3.5 out of 4

In truth, I'm not one to worship Robert Altman. His films—barring the rarities—have been, for me, mostly inconsequential. They're wispy and lighthearted and mostly nonchalant. They work, but on a momentary basis; acting like a bubble that bursts the second the lights go up. Most of the same can be said about A Prairie Home Companion. Only, this time is simply works better.

Garrison Keillor who penned the "A Prairie Home Companion" radio show also works the fingers behind the typewriter for its film adaptation. His script has a kind of "concentrated structure" to it; it's duration running throughout "A Prairie Home Companion's" final live broadcasted show. He balances onstage performance between backstage interactions, the camera smoothly swirling amongst the audience, the stage, and the inner workings of the theatre.

If Altman flashed the negative to achieve a washed-out look for The Long Goodbye, he did quite the opposite for A Prairie Home Companion. The cinematography is rich and sensational, often whirling between different sets in long, gorgeously extended shots. This isn't your typical backstage DV debacle; but the work of a director at the very height of his career.

The cast is yet another stunning ensemble, most of them probably flocking to Altman's direction. Beat this: Meryl Streep, Woody Harrelson, Kevin Kline, Lily Tomlin, Virginia Madsen, Tommy Lee Jones, Lindsay Lohan, John C.Reilly, and Garrison Keillor. Yeah. The beauty of the film is that none of these actors quite seem to be acting. Attribute this to Altman's classic overlapping dialogue, but don't forget to bow your heads to the performers as well. Often I'm annoyed by Altman's stubborn persistence with overlapping dialogue. I'll argue that when Altman should be trying to make cinema, he insists on imitating real life. But with A Prairie Home Companion, the overlapping dialogue is mandatory. Altman's best when he's making a film mostly about people and not about story. This is most obvious here. My one complaint with the film is its aversion to storyline. But this isn't too much of a problem because A Prairie Home Companion is, if nothing else, about the people of the radio show. This is a story about human beings, where overlapping dialogue is only expected.

The story finds itself toeing the line with magical realism. Virginia Madsen plays The Dangerous Woman, who Guy Noir (Kevin Kline) first describes as a femme fatale, and later as an angel. As she convinces us of her divinity, Noir finds a way to use her as an assassin to ward off the buyers of the radio show. This fantasy element works only to heighten the vibrancy of the rest of the film, where feet stay firmly planted to reality. Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin play the singing sisters Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson, with Lindsay Lohan as their gloomy daughter Lola. The three, as contrasting as the actors are on paper, flit about in a realm of familial nostalgia, with Lola penciling out her suicidal songs and scoffing beside their make-up mirrors. John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson are Dusty and Lefty, the singing cowboys who crack dirty jokes backstage and jerk the chain of censorship with Al (Tim Russell), the stage manager. Chuck Akers (L.Q. Jones) and Evelyn (Marylouise Burke) are the elderly lovebirds who chase a potentially fatal lovemaking. And holding all these characters together is Garrison Keillor, whose nostalgia is matched only by his pragmatism and lack of sentimentality towards the show's demise. His performance is probably the most memorable, as the picture is fuller when he strolls about within it, offering truth to the blind antics of some of the other roles with his endless cache of stories.

A Prairie Home Companion's bubble doesn't burst as the lights go up. Instead, we find ourselves wishing the show would go on and the performers keep up doing their crazy little acts. This is Altman in his element; where humans are meant to be portrayed as humans. It's still lighthearted and mostly nonchalant, sure, but it's also about nostalgia and reminiscence, and the beauty that surrounds a family built behind the red curtains and a WLT microphone.

A gentle piffle, "A Prairie Home Companion" is the Summer's most lovely find - a movie that is easy on the ears and seemingly made of sheary, impossible gossamer that would spindle or crush under a more heavy-handed production.

The impressive cast seems to be having a whole lot of fun - Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Lily Tomlin, Woody Harrelson, Lindsay Lohan, LQ Jones et al all have perfunctory if labored singing voices, but it is scripter Garrison Keillor that is the thread that stitches this one together so well. The result is an infectious, genial collection of characters and occasions whose easy charms stay with the viewer days after the film finally unspools its last credit.

Although I have never heard a PHC performance before, the film plays as a tribute to the old days of radio shows and more over, a loving though chilly valentine to the radio days of old. Anyone old enough though not near an NPR station might not know the show but most certainly can hum the tune.

Keillor, he with an alien-like E.T. observation of the goings-on at the final performance of his 30+ year-old live radio show, has a wonderful announcer voice and an above average singing voice that anchors the honest, down home corn-pone credibility of the film. He is a cypher through the picture - a guy you could listen to for hours chat about his exploits, introduce faux commercials and sing a song about nothing in particular. GK has such an ethereal presence that you look at him with such amazement because a "regular" joe like he earns such a shorthand with his audience and can stand toe to toe with aplomb next to Oscar winners like Kline and Streep. It's a great, understated performance.

The movie, directed by the legendary Robert Altman, has such a light touch that it's hard to not fall easily into it's flow. It's dreamy, slight and surreal, yet sets up its universe that is vaguely of today - but what world still has an actual radio show broadcast across the nation so detailed and entertaining as this? Altman and Keillor do the amazing - they deny the audience of any cheap emotion and pathos or short cuts to pay off the scenario. As much as this movie is about the wistful honor and simple entertainment of such a radio programs that used to rule the airwaves in the 1930s through the 1950s, both writer and director refuse to pander to suspected emotional payoffs or happy endings that lesser film creators might. This is a cold, simple and honest movie about the last kick at the can of a venerable institution, and as they choreograph it: so what? Every show, as Keillor says in the film, is the last show. Big deal.

Despite it's frigid demeanor, "A Prairie Home Companion" is filled with warm, quiet moments that offers each cast member has a shining, sterling moment of performance - though none takes centre stage and overpowers or overacts. If anyone goes swinging for the balconies, its Altman regular Tomlin, who creates such a wonderful counterbalance to Streep's simple, honest Minnesotan singing sister partner that she stands as the picture's meta heart - a desperate, hardened yet proud woman backed into a career corner who doesn't know what to do after her regular job is prematurely retired by big radio business. Tomlin deserves an Oscar.

For a film that is steeped in a sentimentality that no longer exists, Altman keeps his sharpened artist eye wandering the set for the most interesting player in the room instead of mourning the sad gone before. There's no release in the movie, no eulogy for the past. "A Prairie Home Companion" is a straight-forward document of what was, not what could have been or what will be.

The director's brilliance is that his lens cares about what technical and bits of business that come to affect in the making of the final show which really tell the story - of a group of people who spend their Saturday nights singing songs, telling stories and transmitting their folksy well-wishes to an imaginary audience listening in on their bedside table radio. In the movie, Altman and Keillor let their staged audience seated in the cavernous Fitzgerald Theater in Minneapolis or those sitting in shoebox movie theater in Anywhere, USA fill in the relevance.

One of the best movies of the year.

"It's not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on." Marilyn Monroe about posing nude on her famous calendar.

If there is anyone more laid back or brighter than Garrison Keillor in show business, let me know, because Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, based on Keillor's long-running Minnesota Public Radio saga, shows Keillor as an audience sees him each week—like a god gently guiding an eccentric ensemble through excellent performances made to look as easy as his demeanor. This film stands near Altman's Nashville as a testimony to the director's gift for sustaining strong characters in layers of dialogue approximating overlapping conversations at an interesting party.

Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as the singing country Johnson sisters bring back memories of Reese Witherspoon's amazing turn as June Carter and Streep's own previous country singer in Postcards. Ditto Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly as the singing and joking Dusty and Lefty. But best of all is Kevin Kline as Keillor's real radio creation, Guy Noir, the '40's dapper, inquisitive, naughty narrator and security head for the production. Klein embodies the melancholic mood always at least hidden underneath any show's last show, despite Keillor's nonchalant assertion that every show is your "last show." Around this realistic, charming premise of talented performers at their last performance, writer Keillor interjects a ghostly beauty in a white leather trench coat, Virginia Madsen playing Dangerous Woman, the spirit of death, gently accompanying those about to die and the moribund show itself. The character is a lyrical embodiment of the theme that nothing lasts but the love shared in any experience. Keillor remains in character after someone dies by stating he doesn't "do eulogies." Nor does he do one for the show, which in real life still lasts in St. Paul from 1974.

So enjoyable are Altman, his ubiquitous HD camera, and his busy dialogue that you feel a part of the proceedings, catching the sweet smell of success for everyone attached to this thoroughly realized song of love to theater, music, and creativity.

Before watching this movie, I had never heard of writer/performer/radio personality Garrison Keillor and the main reason I rented this was because it was Robert Altman's last film. As usual, he managed to rope in several high-profile Hollywood names into his cast - Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin - but, as Altman himself admits in the rambling but not uninteresting Audio Commentary - he is basically just giving cinematic life to Keillor's preoccupations and radio show. The latter features a few Country & Western acts performing for a live audience (which is never shown) including Harrelson and Reilly as rude, lewd singing cowboys (their "Bad Jokes" song is a delightful highlight), Streep (who is clearly having a ball), Tomlin and Lohan as a singing family and even Sam Peckinpah favorite L. Q. Jones as another singing cowboy/old-timer.

The most interesting aspects of the film are non-music related, however: it starts out in a Noir-ish style with smooth-talking detective Guy Noir (Kline) acting as narrator and observer and his clumsy attempts to stop the Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones) from foreclosing the show. Along the way, he meets and falls for a white-clad Angel of Death (Madsen) who, having expired herself in a traffic accident some years back while listening to Keillor's show, has now come to claim the lives of the two Joneses and possibly Kline himself...

While perhaps a minor film in the Altman canon, it is still a respectable and fitting swan song for him. The shadow of impending death hangs so heavily on the movie that it is indeed remarkable how entertaining it actually is; I'm sure there are some more examples of a distinguished film-maker reflecting so openly on his approaching death but the three I can think of at the moment off the top of my head are the Wim Wenders/Nicholas Ray collaboration LIGHTNING OVER WATER (NICK'S MOVIE) (1979; which I've yet to watch for myself), Bob Fosse's ALL THAT JAZZ (1979; like Altman's film, also disguised as a musical) and John Huston's appropriately-titled last film, THE DEAD (1987).

As usual Altman will divide his audience in a radical way. He, clearly, doesn't do it on purpose but it happens more often than not with the works of real artists where there is no room (or very little) for concessions. It is what it is, his vision, his whole. He mentioned that the film was about death and found that not everyone agreed not even some of his closest and more devoted collaborators. That's what he saw, that's what it is but it's bound to be contradicted by critics and audiences alike. Personally, I don't think I'll see a better film this year. The work of an idiosyncratic artist and masterful craftsman doesn't hit the main stream screens every day of the week. My only reservation is that the film is too short. I wanted to go on and on and on. To say that Meryl Streep is sublime seems kind of redundant but never mind, she is, sublime, surprising, funny, very funny, moving, very, very moving. Lily Tomlin and Meryl have the best moments in the film. They appear, look and sound as if they had been working together all their lives. Total chemistry. Lindsay Lohan is the biggest surprise. Good for her. That's the way to forge a way ahead. Work with the best. Woody Harrelson and John C Reilly are simply glorious. Kevin Kline does a Kevin Kline in the most enchanting way. It was also a delight to see Garrison Keillor himself playing himself, not just wonderfully but very convincingly as well. I recommend it with all my heart.