Signis

A Prairie Home Companion

(JPEG) (US, 2006, d. Robert Altman)

For thirty years or more, commentators have written about films having an Altmanesque style. They mean that the film often has long takes, that characters intersect, talk, talk over each other, pass by and that the director does not mind whether we can see and hear everything exactly. Rather, he wants us to share the experience in its complexity, getting as much out of it as we can but never mind if we miss some of the detail.

Looking back, we know that Nashville (his masterpiece?), A Wedding, The Player, Short Cuts, Kansas City, Cookie’s Fortune, Gosford Park, The Company, all work in this way. Now, at age 80, he has made a wonderfully typical Altmanesque entertainment, A Prairie Home Companion.

It is well worth seeing and enjoying. It is a celebration of life. And it has a strong sense of humour.

The person responsible for the humour is longtime broadcaster and writer, Garrison Keilor. His Lake Woebegone stories are a delight to read as mixtures of homespun and shaggy dog stories as well as literate writing. He has broadcast A Prairie Home Companion for over thirty years before a live audience. We now have the chance to share something of what that live audience has enjoyed.

Keilor himself appears as himself and lives up to his reputation even though he is a somewhat fictionalised character. For the film’s purposes and for a sense of dramatic edge, the story concerns the closing of the show, the bulldozing of the theatre (filmed in Keilor’s theatre with many of his regular cast, band and stage hands) for a car park. This is the last show before a Texas millionaire (Tommy Lee Jones) takes over. The spirit of the last show, the hope that it might be saved and the camaraderie between the players as well as their performances (and jokes and the singing of commercials) is what makes up the film.

It opens like a film noir with a private detective’s voiceover in a diner. Actually, the character is one created years back by Keilor, Guy Noir, who is now security for the theatre. As played by Kevin Kline, he is often hilarious, too serious by half, yet clumsy and deadpan. Dapperly dressed, he fumbles and pratfalls very much like Inspector Clouseau (and Kline had just come from his role as Inspector Dreyfuss to Steve Martin’s Clouseau in the remake). He also encounters a mysterious woman in a trenchcoat (Virginia Madsen) who turns out to be a fan, now dead, who is something of a guardian angel (with the touch of the avenging angel).

There are two groups of country and western singers. Two sisters, Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, do quite a few numbers - Meryl Streep enjoying herself and letting loose. Lindsay Lohan is also there as her daughter. The other group consists of Dusty and Lefty who also do some numbers including the hilariously crass song, Bad Jokes (penned by Keilor). They are exuberantly played by Woody Harrelson and John C.Reilly.

This is a tribute to radio, live radio, the audiences, the homespun humour and music of the American mid-west and its values.

Peter Malone