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Altman, Keillor prove a winning team with 'A Prairie Home Companion'

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"A Prairie Home Companion" is as heartwarming as a plate of Powdermilk Biscuits, as unexpected as a slice of rhubarb pie and as wistful as a chorus of "Red River Valley." This winning comedy is the work of two master humanists: director Robert Altman and humorist Garrison Keillor, the radio raconteur on whose show the movie is based.

Picturehouse

'A Prairie Home Companion'

A-

The verdict: Robert Altman and Garrison Keillor together again for the first time! How can you miss?

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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It's the (fictional) final performance of Keillor's long-running program, which has been broadcast from the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minn., since 1974. A beguiling hodgepodge of homespun humor, down-home anecdotes and old-timey music, the show is being taken off the air by the Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones), the representative of a soulless Texas conglomerate that's bought the radio station. In fact, he's coming to the theater to do the dirty work personally.

Meanwhile, Keillor isn't going to let a little thing like being canceled put a pall over the proceedings. Shrugging off sympathy from cast and crew alike, he maintains, "Every show's your last show" — a sentiment that becomes doubly resonant when you consider that Altman is now 81 and this, his 36th feature film, might well be his last.

If so, it's a lovely note to leave on. "A Prairie Home Companion" gives us a slightly warped version of the real thing, complete with Keillor's affable yarn-spinning and phony ads for, well, Powdermilk Biscuits and rhubarb pie. The picture intermixes his regulars — stage manager Tim Russell, the Guy's All-Star Shoe Band, etc. — with Altman's actors. Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin play Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson, the last remaining members of a sister singing act that, as Rhonda notes, was just like the Carter family — only the Carters were famous. John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson turn up as a pair of singing cowboys named Lefty and Dusty — the "Pachelbels of the Prairie," Keillor calls them — who figure the show's finale is the perfect time to pull out every bad bawdy joke they know ("Hey, Lefty, why do they call it PMS?").

Then there's Yolanda's daughter Lola (Lindsay Lohan), who huddles sullenly in a corner of the dressing room, trying to shut out her mother and aunt's constant prattle about dead relatives so she can write her suicide poems. Channeling both Raymond Chandler and Inspector Clouseau, Kevin Kline plays one of the show's recurring characters, hardboiled '40s detective Guy Noir, who's moonlighting as security for the radio station. And wafting through it all in an ethereal white trenchcoat out of "Carnival of Souls" is Virginia Madsen, whom only some of the characters can see.

Is there an Angel of Death in the house?

And while all the shenanigans, emergencies and epiphanies are taking place onstage and off, the Axeman cometh.

"A Prairie Home Companion" trades the acerbic Altman of "The Player" (and "Short Cuts" and "Nashville," among so many others) for a more generous, open-hearted version. Infused with a kind of cosmic nostalgia, the movie does a graceful Tennessee waltz around matters of mortality and acceptance, art and family, hope and reconciliation. With the occasional PMS joke and corny pitch for "that certain something you expect from a pickled product" thrown in.

The program's framework is surprisingly well-suited to the director's trademark overlapping dialogue, inquisitive tracking shots and multiple cameras. Oscar-nominated cinematographer Edward Lachman adds a honeyed hue to the action, cloaking the picture in an even more pensive haze. And the superb cast, with the exception of an distressingly out-of-place Maya Rudolph as a harried production assistant, is just that — superb.

"Let's go out with a little style," stage manager Russell urges the rambunctious Dusty and Lefty (to no avail). Should this be Altman's swan song — please, not — that's exactly how he's done it.