Radio America

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.

Robert Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion" is light, fluffy and fun, much like the radio show. As long as audiences keep this in mind, they'll be sold like Rhubarb pie and duct tape advertised during the broadcast.

The outstandingly cast ensemble and Altman's signature directing style stitch a flowing patchwork of laughs and tinges of nostalgia. Streep and Tomlin are dynamic together (and sing beautifully!), and Kline carries much of the film's comedy on his capable shoulders. The film represents a bygone era that the people of the show are still living in. Only Virginia Madsen, Lindsay Lohan and Tommy Lee Jones represent the outsiders to the otherwise coherent culture of the show, and as the film progresses, affect it and are affected by it in different ways.

I generally prefer films, however comic or fun they are, to have some deeper themes. But unlike the multi-layered theater that most of the film takes place in, there's nothing really behind the scenes here- it's art for arts sake. However, I still enjoyed the film and am actually relieved it didn't bog down in anything too serious.

Whether audiences are fans of the radio show or not, the film's worth its weight in Narco Bran Flakes.

"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.

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.