The Last Show

I thought this was a great kind of love letter to the radio show of the past,, but as a movie it kind of left wanting something that I wasn't getting. The cast is incredible,, but with such an incredible cast I expected some story beyond what was given. I may have completely missed something between the lines,, but I'd say this one is just good,, not great. It's perfectly worth watching,, just don't expect a lot of story.

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.

Have you ever been in a situation where you know a person who moves with grace? He or she may not be a particularly interesting person, nor even a bit of a soulmate. But you like to be near them because they move with such deliberation and beauty that they animate and enlighten the architecture, they bless the space you breath with your eyes. You look forward to your next meeting because you yearn that space.

Altman is like that for me. He isn't about deliberation or noodling around with reality. He's quite simply the most graceful, natural mover I know in cinema. And it isn't just his age, he started this notion as far back as "McCabe," which I recently said was my favorite western when someone insisted on such a recommendation.

Part of his fluidity is a conviction that the art is in arranging the mix, the vortex, before that camera is unpacked. Once it happens, all he has to do is discover it as the actors push the space around. Its shocking what he does because it differs so much from the norm, which usually frames things spatially so the camera can see them.

Part of it has to do with the projects he chooses: meandering stories, folded and separate. Dozens of characters, perhaps. Sometimes, its not obvious, as when he wanders among suspects in "Gosford." Garrison Keillor is a master storyteller, based on one trick, but what a trick! The whole show revolves around his fictional Lake Wobegon which by accretion in our mind is a place with dozens of characters, places and rituals that we know. He'll start a narrative thread for few moments, toying with a certain foible, then as if he lost his focus, he'll take the tail of that morsel as a springboard for a different thread. It may seem to have a similar moral or not. It may have related characters or not. It may even involve a different time. The humor is in the lost threads, the jumps, the lucid fog.

His best rambles may span four of five of these and never return, deliberately never return. Its as if he starts with a treetrunk — the town and its collective zeitgeist — and follows a branch and then hops among leaves like a story squirrel.

Altman is just the opposite. He starts with the leaves and by circumnavigating the crown of the thing he implies an arboreal being. With his birth and modeling films for example, that being isn't so interesting, instead its the grace of the squirrel's eye that amazes us.

So its no surprise that there is no Wobegon story here. This is Altman's dance imposed on Keillor's. They both know it, and Keillor's role is one he does play in the radio show, as a sort of peg around which the Maydayers swirl.

So see this for the dance, the two master dancers but one dance. Along the way, you'll see Streep as you never have before. She's so effortless here. Its obvious that she created her character (and with the others, this is so). Her character is a swimmer in a sea of emotion. She's wet with stories, and we find that she was one of Keillor's. Its too sweet an idea, knowing what sort of an actor she is and how she applies a sort of iron-willed discipline to what she does which we don't notice because of her absolute commitment. But the world in the long run doesn't love these types.

They love the ones that jump in without a plan, that are broken from the last dive but leap again. Its a new Streep we see here. Leaves, wet with the tears of life, ready to fall as her storyteller lights past.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

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).

"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.