My digital camera is gone; above, stock photo subtly suggesting that the Virginia Madsen character is an angel. Get it? There’s more in case you don’t…
A Prairie Home Companion, 2006. Directed by Robert Altman, written by Garrison Keillor. Starring Garrison Keillor, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Virginia Madsen, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, Maya Rudolph, Sue Scott, Tim Russell, Tom Keith, Tommy Lee Jones, and, once again swept under the rug, L. Q. Jones.
After all this time, the “Prairie Home Companion” movie is coming to a theater near you. After months of peeking at celebs in their favorite pizza joints, reading about their exploits around St. Paul, and feeling that warm flush of pride when every last one of them proclaims that Minnesota is just the gosh-darned greatest place on the planet, we finally get to see the movie they came and left in a hurry for. And it is the best thing Robert Altman’s done in since Gosford Park. The problem, as I see it, is that Gosford Park was a great movie sandwiched in between piles and piles of garbage, like Dr. T and the Women. While A Prairie Home Companion is not garbage, it’s far from great. In fact, it’s often infuriating.
A caveat: I’ll grant that my response to the film might reflect my often cynical view of the people of this fine state more than the movie itself. Frankly, I don’t get “A Prairie Home Companion”. I think the monologues are fine, if not eternally redundant, about people I could care less about, and it’s humorless, while trying to be funny. The music is good; the skits are hilarious if you’ve heard them once. Twice, three times, four, they sound the same.
As for the movie, the story’s a mess: The great radio program is being cancelled, which affects its performers in different ways–like crying, to reflect that they’re sad. Apparently, a Texas Christian concern has purchased WLT–the parent company is a commercial station in this fantasyland–and is going to shut it down because it’s out of style, according to The Axeman, played with utter boredom by Tommy Lee Jones. This particular show features Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as the Johnson Sisters, the last remaining pair of a family singing act, and the cowboy act Lefty and Dusty, who are John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson goofing around. Of course, Garrison Keillor leads the cast, along with Kevin Kline as Guy Noir, tripping over everything, telling lame jokes, and drooling over the Dangerous Woman. Madsen is the Dangerous Woman, an angel there to ease someone into death, and giving the cast the heebie-jeebies. The show goes on, we learn that Streep and Keillor once had an affair, and that Lindsay Lohan, as the daughter of Streep, is going to sing at the end but forgets the sheet of paper with her lines. At closing, everyone sings and it’s just beautiful.
Nothing much else happens, which is par for the course with Altman. To criticize this would be akin to grumbling about gazpacho because it’s cold. This is a movie that is ostensibly capturing the beauty of this beloved radio program. We get Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as performers, and the two actresses just shine. The film is worth admission alone for Tomlin–I absolutely loathe the fact that this beautiful woman is not cast in more films, so I’ll enjoy her where I can. Keillor is fine playing himself–I don’t think there’s any doubt that he’ll be nominated for an Oscar for Screenplay or Best Supporting Actor, as that’s just the thing the Academy loves to do. Once again, Altman elicits some wonderful performances from his cast, yet once again he indulges some of the worst: Kevin Kline has not, in my memory, been as unfunny as he is in this film. He seemed at times to be mimicking Steve Martin doing Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther (it doesn’t help that Guy Noir is a seriously unfunny character).
In spite of the songs and the show, A Prairie Home Companion is an Altman film–you can, for the most part, leave Keillor behind. In fact, I know of no director who so embodies the auteur theory, so much so that he seems to delight in wrecking screenplays or diminishing the role of a screenwriter to a cipher–Keillor seems to have written this thing in his spare time, which is part of what must have attracted Altman. A Prairie Home Companion reminds me very much his films The Company and Nashville–the weak plot and interest in the art of the first, the backhanded, hateful approach of the latter. Altman dislikes people and his camera style also suggests that he doesn’t think the audience can get subtle clues. He doesn’t like tight scripts that get a point across, or reveal too much about a character.
Altman’s films are rarely ‘about’ anything, anything coherent that is. Gosford Park was a brilliant skewering of class attitudes–but as much as I enjoyed it, this type of thing was much more pointed sixty years earlier, and many of its fabulous shots are straight out of Renoir’s Rules of the Game. It’s actors weren’t the usual Altman crew–Gosford’s entire cast seemed unwilling to go casual, as is usually the case, diving deep into their character’s souls to bring an emotional clarity that hasn’t been seen in Altman’s work before or after. In A Prairie Home Companion, there is no emotion: the show is coming to an end and you wouldn’t know it affects except that everyone keeps repeating how sad they are and cry at times. Clearly, the end of PHC is meant to jab fans in the ribs, and the utter lack of meaning makes it seem cruel, like a college philosopher at a funeral, wondering about the meaning of life while the rest of us mourn.
Despite having written for The Rake about Altman’s work, I have to admit that his movies elude me–and yet, it’s not so much that their meaning eludes me, but it’s a feeling akin to coming late to a party you weren’t invited to in the first place, all inside jokes and conversations about people you don’t know. A Prairie Home Companion is no different–a galaxy of stars has condescended to make a cute little movie about our favorite radio show, stars who beam and laugh and have a great time, but don’t bother telling any of us a story that has any meaning in our lives. Is it enough to just watch actors having a good time? Much has been written about the sheer beauty of the performances in this film, and yet a great performance, in my mind, takes you into the character, makes the story come alive. It makes us become one with the actors onscreen. Altman’s films keep them separate.
Which leads me to wonder what fans of the show will want from this movie. The problem arises that in Altman’s world we are given a backstage pass to what life is like on a radio show–and yet a documentary would have given us real characters, and exposed the thing, warts and all, from Keillor to the producers to the sound guys and perhaps even the janitors. So what is the point of A Prairie Home Companion, the movie? We get a plot so hackneyed and unfocused it brings no insight to the show, or even to life itself. Like many of Altman’s films, A Prairie Home Companion seems to be… well, it seems to be about making a Robert Altman film.
Altman has said that this movie is about death–“Everybody dies in the end!” he barked at a recent press conference–and in a City Pages interview he added, “You can sit on the street corner and watch people die just walking past you… Some guy’s coming down the street with a cane and a shopping bag and you know this cocksucker’s not going to be alive in two years. Then you see little babies being pushed in their carts who have no idea what the quality of their lives is going to be. It’s very…I don’t even know what I’m talking about. But that’s the kind of thing that impresses me right now.” Unfortunately, since Altman doesn’t give a flying handshake for his story, his characters, or his metaphors, it’s hard to believe he cares about people in his movies–it’s no mistake that he refers to a dying man as a cocksucker. For Altman cares about his actors–that’s all. But when you care only for your actors, and don’t care for the characters they play, or the story they’re in, well, then you don’t care for your audience. People care about “A Prairie Home Companion”, and for a movie that is about this beloved show’s end, it is nothing more than an excuse for these actors to party. And it’s enough, in Altman’s mind, to let us watch his party from a distance.
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