Director – Robert Altman, Screenplay – Garrison Keillor, Story – Garrison Keillor & Ken LaZebnik, Producers – Robert Altman, Wren Arthur, Joshua Astrachan, Tom Judge & David Levy, Photography – Ed Lachman, Music – Richard Dworsky, Special Effects – Steve Hintz, Production Design – Dina Goldman. Production Company – Sandcastle 5/Prairie Home Productions.
Cast
Garrison Keillor (GK), Meryl Streep (Yolanda Johnson), Kevin Kline (Guy Noir), Lily Tomlin (Rhoda Johnson), Woody Harrelson (Dusty), John C. Reilly (Lofty), Virginia Madsen (Dangerous Woman), Lindsay Lohan (Lola Johnson), Maya Rudolph (Molly), L.Q. Jones (Chuck Akers), Tommy Lee Jones (The Axeman), Marylouise Burke (Lunch Lady), Tom Keith (Sound Effects Man), Jearlyn Steele (Herself), Tim Russell (Stage Manager)
Plot
A Prairie Home Companion, a live broadcast radio variety show hosted by Garrison Keillor, has been on the air for over thirty years. It is giving its final performance from the historic Fitzgerald Theater in St Paul, Minnesota just before the building is due to be demolished. Backstage, the various acts of the evening prepare for their performances. These include gospel singing sisters Yolanda and Rhoda Johnson and the cowboy duo Dusty and Lofty. The private detective Guy Noir, who has been hired as security for the show, observes a mystery woman in a white coat who wanders through the theatre before she reveals that she is an angel of death.
Robert Altman (1925-2006) was an individualistic and enormously influential American film director who enjoyed a career that spanned over five decades, Altman made many classic works during this time with M.A.S.H. (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Nashville (1975), The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993) and Gosford Park (2001), among others. His films featured ensemble casts and dialogue that was delivered in a naturalistic overlapping style. He received multiple Academy Award nominations as both director and screenwriter, although the only one he actually received was an honorary Oscar in 2006, while he was also recipient of various Emmy, BAFTA and Golden Globe awards. Altman made a surprising number of genre films (for which see below).
A Prairie Home Companion was Altman’s last film before his death on November 20, 2006. The film is an adaptation of A Prairie Home Companion, a long running radio show that aired between 1974 and 2016 based out of the Fitzgerald Theater in St Paul, Minnesota. The show was the creation of Garrison Keillor, a Minnesota native who came from a background in radio. Keillor conceived the idea of a variety show that was a weekly two-hour live broadcast that would feature an assortment of musical acts – gospel, country, blues or folk. These were interspersed with segments that came in Keillor’s own idiosyncratic humour, which included commercials for fictional products and sponsor messages, and a series of comedy sketches, the most famous of which was the News from Lake Wobegon segment, a series of reports about a fictional Minnesotan town and its residents. Keillor was fired from the show in 2016 whereupon the show then rebranded itself as Live from Here but interest waned and it was cancelled within a year. In between his radio work, Keillor was a renowned humourist and essayist for many leading magazines, as well as having published several books.
Keillor writes the script for the film and imagines a typical performance. Keillor himself is on stage much of the time, introducing, delivering messages from fictitious sponsors and joining several of the acts as they perform. His regular crew play themselves, while Keillor wanders in and out of the backstage dramas telling a series of dry anecdotes. This blurs a line between the fictional and the real in the sense that A Prairie Home Companion was not cancelled in 2006, nor the Fitzgerald Theater demolished. The script even suggests a past relationship between Keillor and Meryl Streep’s character. The film also brings to life the show’s ongoing character of the detective Guy Noir. The big disappointment is the lack of any comedy segments, in particular the News from Lake Woebegone, the radio show’s most popular drama, although we do get various of the fictitious sponsor messages.
(l to r) Garrison Keillor, Meryl Streep and Lindsay Lohan perform on air
A Prairie Home Companion is similar to many of Altman’s films – Nashville, Short Cuts, Pret-a-Porter (1994), Gosford Park – in that it follows the lives of different characters in and around a particular locale – in this case, the fictional final broadcast of the show. Aside from Keillor who wanders in and out of conversations and performances, the main acts are Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as gospel-singing sisters, along with Lindsay Lohan as Meryl’s daughter who writes poetry about suicide and is persuaded to join them on stage; Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly as a cowboy act; and L.Q. Jones as an old timer who does a number than expires shortly after. That is along with non-singing characters such as Maya Rudolph’s P.A. and Tommy Lee Jones as The Axeman, the executive come to close the show down.
In addition, there is the character of Guy Noir, a parody of a Film Noir detective that appeared on the radio, and is played here by Kevin Kline. Noir talks in the over-the-top purple prose familiar to detective film narration. There is also Virginia Madsen as a mysterious angel of death clad in a white coat who drifts around with enigmatic purpose, radiates understanding and may have been a fan of the show in her previous life. She comes to collect L.Q. Jones and the last scene of the film is her closing in on Keillor, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin and Lindsay Lohan as they converse at a table in a diner. Madsen’s character has a certain melancholy effect and casts even more of a shadow over the film in that Altman himself died only nine months after the film was released.
Altman’s telling of the stories is very laidback. There are no big dramatics to the film, just minor incidental character observations behind the scenes, all in Altman’s familiar style of simultaneous, overlapping dialogue. One also is impressed by the calibre of stars that Altman manages to bring in to the film – including Meryl Streep, no less. And moreover, all of them get to sing their own material. One of the surprises is Lindsay Lohan. Lohan was seen as a rising star around the time, just before she fell prey to the party lifestyle and became a tabloid headline punchline. It is indicative of the promise that Lohan was seen as having back in the day that Altman casts her as the daughter of Meryl Streep, who was and still is considered the cream of American acting royalty.
Robert Altman’s other films of genre interest are:– Countdown (1967) about a Moon landing mission; the completely gonzo Brewster McCloud (1971) about a young man who is invoked to build a set of wings by an angel; Images (1972), a surrealist film about identity blurring; 3 Women (1977), a cryptic film about identity blurring; Quintet (1979), an enigmatic film set in a frozen future; Popeye (1980) adapted from the famous comic-strip.
