A Prairie Home Companion - Austin American-Statesman movie review

'A Prairie Home Companion' is a well-crafted yarn

By JOHN DeFORE
Austin American-Statesman

Leave it to Robert Altman, that pioneer of overlapped dialogue whose movies sometimes feel held together with chewing gum, to prove that Garrison Keillor's radio show "A Prairie Home Companion" — an even-keel chuckle-dispenser that has performed with Midwestern steadiness lo these many years — is all chaos underneath its calm surface.

Sure, sure: Keillor wrote the movie's script. But if he didn't binge on "Nashville" and its kin before sitting down to his typewriter, or if Altman wasn't leaning mischievously over his shoulder, I'll eat a carton of Powdermilk Biscuits without butter or jam.

Picturehouse

'A Prairie Home Companion'

4 out of 5 stars

The verdict: Life on the 'Prairie' never looked so charmingly chaotic.

Director: Robert Altman
Starring: Garrison Keillor, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep, Woody Harrelson, Lindsay Lohan
Run time: 105 minutes
Release date: June 9, 2006
Rating: PG-13 for risqué humor.
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Rather than go the concert-movie route, documenting an actual radio broadcast for posterity, Altman and Keillor reimagine the show as a backstage drama, where such real-world "Companion" performers as Robin and Linda Williams and sound effects guy Tom Keith are joined by characters created for the film — like the Johnson Sisters, surviving members of a Carter Family-like group — and mutations like Guy Noir, whose parody character has been recast as the security man (played with affectionate slapstick by Kevin Kline) who invariably fails to keep things under control.

(Film buffs got a taste of the Johnson Sisters on this year's Oscars, where Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin introduced Altman's lifetime achievement award; they bring that same easy chemistry to "Prairie," and one of them proves to be a good singer as well.)

Backstage dramas are nothing without, well, drama, and this one offers the ultimate — the show is about to be canceled. Some heartless megacorp from, er, Texas has bought radio station WLT and decided to liquidate both the program and the lovely Fitzgerald Theater that houses it, making way for a parking lot.

As the rumor gets around, a sense of mortality spreads throughout cast and crew. A mysterious white-clad blonde (Virginia Madsen) appears, who is either an angel paving Death's way or a creation of Guy Noir's oversexed imagination; the air is heavy with not-quite-yet goodbyes; one character actually expires before the curtain goes down. In his way, Altman manages to mine this theme for comic relief while allowing it to linger poignantly in the air after the laughs subside.

The film's main pleasure, though, is talk — the kind of constant dialogue one hears whispered in the wings and unloaded in dressing rooms. Actors retell anecdotes they've told for decades, never the same way twice (Keillor's "how I got into radio" is eternally fluid, despite always involving a man with his pants dangling around his ankles); they make an art of bad jokes (John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson have an irresistible, teasing banter going as cowboy pals Dusty and Lefty); and they occasionally even work out real human issues.

The movie has an unmissable affection for this kind of stuff, as it does for the unapologetically square music and comedy going on simultaneously onstage. Movies about moviemaking are often obsessed with productions that fall apart (or at best squeak by in a form so compromised that everyone involved should be ashamed). Movies about the theater, on the other hand, tend to relish the miraculous successes that look, from the audience, like business as usual. The last broadcast of "Prairie Home Companion" might suffer the occasional glitch — a first-time performer forgetting her song's lyrics, an old hand venting some simmering grudges — but there's never a sense that the audience notices enough to mind.

Their appreciation is as much about the past as it is about what they're actually seeing, as cemented in nostalgia for the show as the show is nostalgic for an earlier age — an age before show business was owned by multinational conglomerates, and when in fact (despite the sponsor's occasional message) it hardly seemed like a business at all.