A Prairie Home Companion

A Prairie Home Companion. Directed by Robert Altman (written by Garrison Keillor). Starring Kevin Kline, Meryl Streep, Garrison Keillor, Woody Harrelson, Lindsey Lohan, L.Q. Jones, Lily Tomlin, Tommy Lee Jones, Virginia Madsen, John Reilly.

Tunes of Hoary… minus a story (Urf! Urf!). To savor this curious piece you must enjoy a) Robert Altman (M*A*S*H, Nashville, Ready to Wear) and b) Garrison Keillor. Anybody unhappy enough to have watched all three of the Altman movies above will remember (or not) the want of a plot. Don’t look for one here, either. Altman’s specialty is mood and personality, the ambience (French for “what the flock is going on”) of small, arcane subcultures: loudmouth doctors who think racking in a warm tent on three hots a day is combat; truants from New Jersey who immigrate to the South wearing chambray shirts and braying like Leadbelly; anorexic fee-male mannequins who have to choose between high cheekbones, pouty lips and a soul (oh, yeah… like you’d choose “soul”!), between life with one man and notoriety withoutany (I mean, like, we all know who it is designs clothes, for Pete’s sake…). Every time he generates one of these high-profile, star-studded disasters, he has to go into hiding for five years before anyone will trust him with another (the persistence of memory; the vanity of hope). So like the locust, he’s returned and right on schedule. Garrison Keillor, likewise a known commodity, stewards his aging folkstars from the inner reaches of Middletown (which I think was Muncie, a stone’s through from St. Paul, although who’d bother to throw a stone and who’d notice if anyone did, I can’t fathom since Muncie and St. Paul are the same flockin’ thing except for the snow and the corn and can’t remember right off which one has which) in and out of a parallel menagerie of invented characters fresh spun of his childhood in radio days among the Lutherans (and worse) of the Heartlands. Keillor, if unphotogenic (“…not too close!”), is clever (have to be on radio on account of all you got is words) and self-deprecating and a keen observer of what I guess we’re doomed to call Americana (Latin for “stuff you toss in the dumpster”). Both he and his subject are moribund just now… so this film is, if premature, a requiem of a sort.

“…of a sort”? Nothing that subtle ever got past Altman. It not only is a requiem, but it tells you so, dummy, and in case you miss it, across the sepia-shaded sets of A Prairie Home’s last broadcast clops a white-trenchcoated specter in six-inch heels (Madsen, looking 40’s-ish, that’s 1940’s-ish) not content to let us dee-vine that she’s the Angel of Death (Asphodel, I think they call her) but tell us so (about eleven flockin’ times). Anyhow, apart this clumsy (uncharacteristically so for Keillor, too) device (and about fifteen minutes too many of dirty jokes sung by Dusty and Lefty, the gritty singing cowboys, played deadpanly by professional deadpans Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly… dunno how this dreck got in but might just check with Pastor Kornmuller on account of I thinnnnnnnnk Martin Luther—Lord love him—mighta fetched up a more than casual interest in what us Krauts call Dreck which Luther wrote in those days with small d- on account of his own), the thing is pleasant to watch and mostly to listen to. All thoseold songs that haunt memory: folk; snatches of spiritual; pop music from back when singers could sing and you could hear the words; tunes of desperation but of elevation, too; anthems for, from, of a dumbo people never too tired or too beaten in to dream of a better day. What radio brought once. Might remember that next time some whining “free-lance writer” obviously from Rahway intones on NPR her essay about how the viscous film on her expired fruit-at-the-bottom yogurt reminds her of that thin film of ozone protecting us from incineration, noxious but natural and ultimately benevolent and on and on… see just how “elevated” you feel in its wake.

Anyhow. Story such as it is Guy Noir (Kevin Kline, still doing Otto on account of never got over that Oscar… or beyond) narrates in voiceover. It seems this is the final episode of Prairie Home. An evil financier from Texas (where evil financiers all come from…and go to after they die: Tommy Lee Jones, in a virtually wordless two-minute performance but appropriately oily and sinister, as I guess finance guys are) has bought the whole shebang he’s now gonna “tear down to build a parking lot.” Finality (read Death) stalks the soundstage as fading folk(semi-)legends du- their final -et (the Johnson Sisters, played with sisterly spat-itude by Streep and Tomlin, who’ve brought their young daughter-niece, Lindsey Lohan, to debut, a virginal voice born of the last throes of radio, so life is renewed or something from out the ashes; Lohan, sadly, hasn’t got the voice to belt out an anthem and sings “Frankie and Johnny” for bubblegummers …talk about a dark destiny!). And, as if you didn’t pick it up, you dummy, L.Q. Jones in a rare return to the screen (Wild Bunch, Boy and His Dog), checks out (sorry to ruin it but happens early in flick, so no surprise) to somber up the mood. Keillor is Keillor and that’s all he could be. And that’s not bad, between his presence on stage/screen as a sort of rock amid the bedlam and his (mostly) light touch on the script. The flick opens and closes in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks diner, sepia and pastel leaching into the rain-soaked streets of the ‘burg as lonely souls shamble off into the dim-lit darkness. Us, too.