Who's
In It: Garrison Keillor, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Woody Harrelson, Tommy
Lee Jones, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly Who Directed It: Robert Altman
Prairie
Home Companion in a strange sort of way is the bucolic version of Dave Chappelle’s
Block Party. Both are very entertaining mixtures of music, comedy and behind the
scenes docudrama. Of course PHC is sort of a televised version of Garrison Keillor’s
venerable radio program that’s been on the air for 31 years and counting.
Filmed at St. Paul’s Fitzgerald theater in Keillor’s home state of Minnesota,
the film (written by Keillor and Ken LaZebnik) imagines a tearful final show that
has outlived it’s unique niche and is at last being bought and replaced by
a soulless Texas corporation. If you want to read a leftist agenda into Keillor’s
choice of villainous state feel free.
Though
there is a certain amount of the overlapping dialogue one would expect from an
Altman film, it’s fairly unnecessary and seems forced at times. Still the
top drawer cast is so obviously having a ball doing this that you mostly forget
to notice such trifling matters. Streep and Tomlin play Rhonda and Yolanda Johnson
the remaining members of a one-time four member family troupe. Their presence
and easy interplay gives the film a calming center that grounds some of the more
troubling and strange things that have suddenly befallen the usually sedate set.
One
of which is Yolanda (Streep’s) troubled daughter Lola (a subdued Lindsay
Lohan) whose penchant for dark poetry and fascination with suicide is a bit of
a thorn in Yo’s side, but she seems to take it in stride as though her show
business life has annured her to such things to some extent. In fact everyone
treats the matter as the sort of transient phase that they’ve all seen in
one form or another many times before. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly certainly
steal the show as a pair of country crooners with a tendency toward one-upsmanship.
Toward the end of the second act they tie into a song that is nothing but a series
of semi-dirty jokes that goes on for quite a while, but I think I speak for everyone
when I say it was way too brief.
The
typical hard day’s night is intruded upon by dark and wondrous forces, which
security director Guy Noire (Kevin Kline) picks up on in his Chandleresque manner.
Something strange is afoot and this represents a challenge for the typically bored
would-be gum-shoe. Death herself is to visit the set on this most poignant and
bittersweet night, come in the form of an angel in a white dress (Virginia Madsen)
who moves in and around the set, noticed by some and invisible to most. The personification
of corporate evil pull up in a limo in the person of Tommy Lee Jones who has come
to inspect his new property and perhaps out of respect for the radio institution
his presence spells the end of. He watches the show anonymously from a balcony
booth and seems ruefully bemused by what he sees.
A
randy old cowboy singer who regularly plays nasty with one of the programs wardrobe
women dies in the throws of ecstasy and the woman in white is there to ferry his
soul to where it belongs. But her attention is focused upon the dark presence
in the balcony. These whimsical plotpoints aren’t much more than innocuous
distraction from the music and merriment on stage and never add up to much but
some sort of camp value. Keillor proves to be an ample anchor for this movie version
of his life. His easy stage presence and regular guy singing voice gives the film
what it gave the radio program for all those years. A sly intelligent wit hiding
behind a low key demeanor, who knows just when to pull the string of a yarn -
comfortable in his role as Midwestern minister of mirth and myth.
Horribly
conspicuous in it’s absence is the beloved Tales from Lake Woebegone, an
omission that must have either been tied up in trademark travails or deemed out
of step with the musical mystery of the movie. A strong hunch leans toward the
latter - I’ll have to get Guy Noire right on that.
