This review was requested by Nate Biagiotti. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.
Director: Robert Altman
Writer: Garrison Keillor
Cast: Garrison Keillor, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Virginia Madsen, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly, Maya Rudolph, Lindsay Lohan, Lily Tomlin, L.Q. Jones, Tommy Lee Jones
Runtime: 105 mins.
2006
As far as subject matter goes, your enjoyment may vary depending on how into white people singing about rhubarb you are. The down home aw shucks folksy podunk salt of the earth wisdom of the dirt vibe is not my favorite, and this movie is nearly two hours straight of it. For this is the final night of the live radio play "A Prairie Home Companion," whose theater has been bought out by A Corporation. The film more or less matches the runtime of the play, so we are constantly flitting between charming old people singing charming songs and charming old people swapping charming backstage banter. The troupe expresses their grief at the closure in a panoply of ways, while Garrison Keillor (or "GK" as the movie styles him) occupies the center of it all, stalwart and stubborn about performing his job exactly as he always does.
Like all great art, A Prairie Home Companion is about far more than its topic. You don't have to be a fan of musical cowboys telling lewd jokes about erections to appreciate art about the people who brought such a thing into existence. What's interesting about the show within the movie is the way it telescopes the personal stories of performers who have been intimately tied to the production for decades. Keillor knows that stories are about people foremost, and director Altman obliges in shaping a tricky, busy script into something successfully personal.
The film is all about focus and rhythm. Keillor succeeds because he cannot be rushed. He sucks up his environment like an old sponge. One of the film's other great characters, hypercompetent Stage Manager Molly (Maya Rudolph) succeeds for the opposite reason. She is sharp, alert, and determined to pay attention to the scores of small details that inevitably get bungled in live productions. Meanwhile, the editing shifts our focus from onstage to backstage seamlessly, in the middle of songs, in the middle of sentences, in a way that makes us feel deeply involved. Altman is a director famous for layering, and in his last film he demonstrates mastery of exactly that. Music is omnipresent, nudged up and down on intercoms and radios; conversation is a blanket, warm, cacophonous, comfortable.
This shifting focus isn't only a storytelling tool, but a commentary on showmanship. In one of the film's best scenes, the one that I feel exemplifies the work of live art, Molly tries to locate a script to hand to GK onstage but instead shuffles a stack of papers into a big mess. Between GK, an intrepid Sound Effects Man (Tom Keith), and the two Johnson sisters Yolanda and Rhonda (Streep and Tomlin), the onstage ensemble manages to stretch an ad for Duct Tape into an extended foley improvisation gag followed by an existential meditation on the uncertainty of things. At first our entire focus is dominated by the awkwardness of this technical disaster and we half-listen to GK's ramblings, but as the performers find the bit, we forget entirely that we are waiting for something else to be resolved. As if the scene wasn't doing enough work already, it ends with Yolanda venturing deep enough into the Duct Tape bit that she discovers some private truth about commitment that she must immediately try to mask.
There is a double bind of nostalgia operating here. Like any ensemble these performers are nostalgic for their time together, but the difference is that their entire livelihoods are built around nostalgia. They are antiquated bards performing in a defunct medium. Two defunct mediums, arguably, depending on how you feel about live theatre. These are folks who are invested in a mechanism of nostalgia-production. A remembering of remembering.
Then you have those who are outside the ensemble looking in, such as ancillary figures Guy Noir (Kevin Kline), a detective working security for the show, the Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones), a corporate bigwig who shows up to eyeball the show before killing it, and the Dangerous Woman (Virginia Madsen), an angel of death looking to soak up as much as she can before taking someone away to God. These three provide the framing mechanism. Sometimes they look at these silly artists like bugs behind a pane of glass, sometimes they become deeply invested in their stories.
Finally, there is GK, enduring it all like Kermit the Frog without the anxiety. The most appealing aspect of Keillor writing himself into the center of his own passion project is that it isn't a flattering portrayal. The GK we see here gives freely of his life force, yet he withholds so much of his interiority from the world. There is a weariness, a sense of a full life perhaps a little hollowed out by decades of being so much to so many. Keillor removes himself from his own story in this way to show that the emperor has no clothes. The show doesn't work because there is a mastermind at its center; it works because there is a man surrounded by people who care. GK is at his softest, after all, when talking about what people want to talk about, and at his prickliest when folks feel like there's something that must be said.
The high concept framing elements are both perfectly intuitive and completely at odds with the simplicity of the rest of the film. The beautiful angel of death feels a bit on the nose, and the bumbling sexual harassment detective is equal parts insightful and intolerable. These fancy bits work best when they are grounded in the mundane, as in the film's quietest scene. GK sits backstage with the Dangerous Woman and they discuss, frankly, the unfunny Prairie Home Companion joke that led to her death in a car accident. GK can't conjure up an explanation for why his lame joke made her laugh so hard. "I guess because it's funny," he shrugs, melancholy, an impenetrable oracle. He wishes he could stay and talk more, but for him, and for now, his show must go on.
4 / 5 BLOBS
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