A Prairie Home Companion (2006)
November 21st, 2006
R.I.P. Robert Altman
1925-2006
A Prairie Home Companion, Robert Altman’s last movie, is a pure pleasure. It’s like a hot bath and a good book.
It’s a bit hard to describe. I’ve never heard the American radio program it commemorates, but I don’t think you need to know much to enjoy it.
I actually have the Italian version, which is called “Radio America.” I think that’s a better title.
The movie celebrates country music, tradition, and carrying on regardless. It purports to show the very last broadcast of the radio show of the title, and it features the actual star and creator of that show, Garrison Keillor, playing himself.
In this film the theatre where the show is staged has been sold to a conglomerate headed by a man in black (Tommy Lee Jones), who has turned up to catch the final broadcast. He’s going to tear down the theatre.
Typically for Altman, the film features a large ensemble cast. Much of the casting is odd. Why are Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, and Woody Harrelson playing country singers? And what is Lindsay Lohan doing here? But Streep and Tomlin are a delight as singing sisters, the last remnants of a family band “Like the Carter Family, but not as famous.” Streep can even sing a bit.
Harrelson (Cheers) is a lot of fun. And Lohan, pop brat of the moment, in her role as a teenage girl who writes poems about suicide, comes through with what might be the best performance in the film: a raunchy rendition of Frankie and Johnny. (”He was her man… and he was a jerk.”)
This movie has an angel in it, always a good sign for me. Virginia Madsen, the woman in white, has come to take someone home; but it seems as if she has really come to take the radio show home. In the end she pulls a bit of magic to try and save the day, but even if she can stop the man in black, she cannot stop progress.
The woman in white usually appears haloed by a light. That is Kevin Kline as Guy Noir, former gumshoe, head of security for the theatre.
Oh by the way!
I just learned something I didn’t know: Virginia Madsen, the angel, who also appeared opposite Paul Giamatti in 2004’s Sideways, is the sister of Michael Madsen, the ear-slicing gangster from Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
Back to the movie…
Although its medium is country music, this isn’t a concert movie. Plenty of plots are going on including a love affair, somebody dying, and somebody being born, and the camera roams freely from scene to scene in endless Altman takes, recording everything in long swirls of action.
Everything about this movie is good. If you haven’t seen it you should hurry up. I think you will like it even if… gasp!… you don’t like country music.
So long Mr. Altman, thanks for all the movies.
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