NYT film review: Altman/Keillor "A Prairie Home Companion" is "wonderful"

Altman's Casual Chaos Meets Keillor's Rhubarb-Tinged Nostalgia in 'A Prairie Home Companion'
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: June 9, 2006


Garrison Keillor with Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep as the Johnson Sisters and Lindsay Lohan as Lola Johnson in "A Prairie Home Companion."

A late, minor addition to the Robert Altman collection — but a treasure all the same — "A Prairie Home Companion" is more likely to inspire fondness than awe. This is entirely appropriate, since the movie snuggles deep into the mood and sensibility of its source, Garrison Keillor's long-running public radio variety show.

Beloved by tote-baggers across the land, Mr. Keillor's weekly cavalcade of wry Midwestern humor and musical Americana has never set out to make anyone's hair stand on end. Notwithstanding the occasional crackle of satire or sparkle of instrumental virtuosity, it mostly offers reliable doses of amusement embedded in easygoing nostalgia. It looks back on — or, rather, reinvents — a time when popular culture was spooned out in grange halls and Main Street movie palaces, and when broadcasting was supposedly a local affair sponsored by mom-and-pop purveyors of biscuits and Norwegian pickled herring.

In the film Mr. Keillor, who wrote the screenplay and also plays himself (as a jowly, owlish and curiously detached master of ceremonies), supplies the whimsy. Mr. Altman, a more cantankerous spirit (he comes from Kansas City, Mo., a wilder corner of the Midwest than Mr. Keillor's Minnesota), brings his unrivaled sense of chaos and his mischievous eye for human eccentricity. Together they have confected a breezy backstage comedy that is also a sly elegy: a poignant contemplation of last things that goes down as smoothly and sweetly as a lemon drop.

The action takes place during the final performance of "A Prairie Home Companion," a live radio broadcast that, unlike its real world counterpart, is not made possible by the generous support of listeners like you. Its home station, WLT, has been gobbled up by a Texas-based chain and a corporate heavy, known only as the Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones), has been sent north to shut the program down.... The film is, partly, a protest against the smooth, standardized, bottom-line culture represented by the Axeman, and a defiant celebration of imperfection, improvisation and accident. Sometimes you forget a song lyric, your joke falls flat or you scatter the pages of your script all over the floor. Such mishaps occur frequently in "A Prairie Home Companion," and each one turns into a moment of grace. It's not a perfect movie, and it does not aspire to be a great one. It's just wonderful.

http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/movies/09prai.html

I thought it sounded interesting when I first heard the movie was being made. I'm glad it got a good review and I can't wait to see it. Unfortunately, I'll have to wait until I can rent it...

Altman/Keillor ... How can you not believe?

Another tip ... if you haven't listened to Keillor's book "Homegrown Democrat" on tape/CD, you're missing half the fun. Read that book, or listen to it. It will give you strength in these troubled times!!!

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060608/REVIEWS/60606001

Here's the beginning of Roger Ebert's review of "PHC" ...

"What a lovely film this is, so gentle and whimsical, so simple and profound. Robert Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion" is faithful to the spirit of the radio program, a spirit both robust and fragile, and yet achieves something more than simply reproducing a performance of the show. It is nothing less than an elegy, a memorial to memories of times gone by, to dreams that died but left the dreamers dreaming, to appreciating what you've had instead of insisting on more. ..."

and the end ...

"... Like the show that inspired it, "A Prairie Home Companion" is not about anything in particular. Perhaps it is about everything in general: About remembering, and treasuring the past, and loving performers not because they are new but because they have lasted. About smiling and being amused, but not laughing out loud, because in Minnesota loud laughter is seen as a vice practiced on the coasts. About how all things pass away, but if you live your life well, everything was fun while it lasted. There is so much of the ghost of Scott Fitzgerald hovering in the shadows of this movie that at the end I quoted to myself the closing words of The Great Gatsby. I'm sure you remember them, so let's say them together: And so we beat on, boats against the current, drawn back ceaselessly into the past. ..."

I just know I'm going to leave the theater in a good mood.

He's like a trustworthy friend.

Can't wait to see this one.