A Prairie Home Companion review

2006.07.17 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole

The end is near for the radio show A Prairie Home Companion. Cast and crew can hardly believe it, but host Garrison Keillor is so blasé that nothing seems real. Legendary director Robert Altman treats the legendary radio show with the utmost care to create a gentle and amusing film that mirrors the feel of the radio show but gives it more focus and depth—barely.

Keillor plays himself, more or less, preparing for the end of the St. Paul-based show, which is being closed down because its Fizgerald Theater has been bought out by a corporation that wants to turn it into a parking lot... of course. Too tired to fight after 35 years together in the radio business, GK and companions stage their last show with dignity and without even a mention to the audience.

Kevin Kline plays Guy Noir, Keillor's slightly dim-witted private detective character, as the theater security man, altho one wonders exactly how much security the show has ever needed. Tonight he has his hands full trying to keep an eye on a mysterious woman in a white trench coat played by Virginia Madsen. Meanwhile, the performers, who include Keillor's regular players from the show as well as Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep, Woody Harrelson, and John C Reilly, can't imagine the show ending and fret about their futures.

Keillor wrote the screenplay, and Altman pulls performances from his players like a classical conductor. We get crosstalk and improvisation, or what seems like improvisation, that somehow meshes with other business with precise timing. But we also get a lot of rather broad slapstick, with Kline in particular smashing his fingers in door and drawers, being the butt of fart jokes (in a manner of speaking), and doing prat falls. There's more subtle comedy to be found in Keillor's extreme lackadaisical attitude not merely toward the death of the show but even at the offstage death of one of his friends and performers.

Tommy Lee Jones nearly steals the show with his portrayal of the uptight ax-man sent to shut down the theater. The conversation between him and Madsen is sublime. But it hardly seems to go anywhere. In fact, all Madsen's scenes are wonderful set pieces, but the revelation she brings is so on-the-nose that it weakens the overall structure of the story.

Maya Rudolph is more or less wasted as the pregnant stage manager (who breaks a cardinal rule of film-making: a pregnant lady must give birth on camera by the end of the movie). But Lindsey Lohan shines as Lola, the daughter of one of Keillor's regular players (Tomlin), whose character has protagonist's arc. She goes from not caring about the show (or life) to caring about it a lot to even participating in it with an inspired version of Frankie and Johnnie that she improvises out of half-remember verses and bits of conversation from earlier in the evening.

Reilly and Harrelson have lot of fun with their dopey cowboy characters, and Streep and Tomlin are terrific as the sister act that's a little long in the tooth and as quietly bitter as they are Minnesota nice. Plus, it's great just to see Keillor get his venerable radio show committed to celluloid for all time.

Overall, the film is warm and fuzzy experience, but lacks a certain bite that it ought to have. The time really has passed for shows like this—Keillor's real-life radio show, with its fake ads for biscuit mix and rhubarb pie, is at least half kitsch and nostalgia—so we don't feel any sense of injustice. And in Madsen's and Jones's characters, Keillor has taken the sting out of death itself.

It just feels like there ought to be a little sting.

f e e d b a c k

Respond to this page by your e-mail client. Please be sure to mention the title of the article.

s i d e b a r