Robert Altman (2006)
Robert Altman was eighty and his health poor when he made A Prairie Home Companion. For insurance purposes, Paul Thomas Anderson had to be named standby director in case Altman couldn’t complete the shoot. It may be termed a musical comedy but the film is all about mortality. The action comprises the last edition of a long-running live radio variety show. The characters include an Angel of Death. This was Altman’s last film. He died in November 2006, a few months after its release.
The show of the title is based on a real show of the same name, whose longevity matches that of its fictionalised version. A Prairie Home Companion first aired live on Minnesota Public Radio in 1974. Until 2016, it was hosted by the humorist Garrison Keillor, who wrote the screenplay for Altman’s film and appears in it as himself. Like its real-life counterpart, Altman’s show takes place in the Fitzgerald Theater in St Paul, Minnesota, named for the town’s most famous son – F Scott Fitzgerald. Unlike the theatre in the movie, which is threatened with demolition, the Fitzgerald is still going strong today.
The performers, alongside compere Keillor (GK), include the Johnson Girls singing duo – sisters Rhonda (Lily Tomlin) and Yolanda (Meryl Streep); comical cowboys Dusty (Woody Harrelson) and Lefty (John C Reilly); and members of The Guys All-Star Shoe Band, who are regulars on the real radio show. The numbers performed are a mixture of original and traditional songs, some of the latter tailored (with lyrics by Keillor) for the film (Stephen Foster’s ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ becomes ‘My Old Minnesota Home’, for example). The offstage personnel likewise include a mixture of actors (notably Maya Rudolph as Molly, a heavily pregnant stage manager) and people from the actual A Prairie Home Companion (Tim Russell, Sue Scott and Tom Keith). The occasional narrator is Guy Noir (Kevin Kline), an out-of-work private detective, who’s taken a job looking after the theatre’s security.
Then there’s the unexpected visitor to the Fitzgerald. The Angel of Death (Virginia Madsen) is a glamorous figure in a white trench coat. She used to be Lois Peterson, who died in an accident while listening to the show on her car radio, and laughing at one of GK’s jokes so much that she lost control of the vehicle. Labelled ‘Dangerous Woman’ in the cast list, she also goes by the name of Asphodel (the plant’s post-mortem connections go all the way back to Greek mythology). She’s a gently smiling, gently spoken presence, whose appearance in the theatre presages the peaceful backstage demise of one of the show’s stalwarts, Chuck Akers (L Q Jones). Without her manner changing, Asphodel becomes, in the later stages, a more ominous figure. She informs ‘Axeman’ (Tommy Lee Jones) – an agent of the radio station’s new parent company, on a flying visit to the theatre to confirm the show’s death sentence – of a short cut for the road journey back to the airport. When Axeman’s car drives away, Asphodel is in it beside him, with inevitable results. Guy Noir’s voiceover explains that, although Axeman was never seen again, nor was the show. In a postscript to the main action, the ex-performers on it meet in a St Paul diner to discuss a possible comeback. Their conversation stops when Asphodel comes through the door.
Death features in other guises too. Yolanda’s recalcitrant teenage daughter Lola (Lindsay Lohan) writes poems about suicide (‘Don’t expect to wake up and get toast for breakfast/The toast is you’). While the performers appear in light, beyond the stage is dark: the live audience in the theatre is heard but hardly seen, to almost ghostly effect. The compere’s script, with repeated references to the show’s commercial sponsors, is benignly satirical and Garrison Keillor delivers it perfectly. The whole film is clever. Yet A Prairie Home Companion feels oddly inconsequential, despite its theme and the resonance of this with Altman’s own life and career.
All the singing’s good although the pro singers (Jearlyn Steele and others, seemingly uncredited) are more enjoyable than the talented actors doing numbers. Meryl Streep may be as fundamentally wrong for an Altman film as Jack Lemmon was (in Short Cuts). Her inventiveness conceals this to a degree but the result is irritating – she never stops trying out new mannerisms and scene-stealing bits of business. Even allowing that Yolanda is scatty, Streep doesn’t, unlike Lily Tomlin, create a stable character. Woody Harrelson and John C Reilly are a more satisfyingly balanced partnership: Dusty and Lefty’s potty-mouthed ‘Bad Jokes’ routine, written by Keillor, is the funniest thing in the film. Kevin Kline’s Guy Noir is the unfunniest. A regular character on the actual A Prairie Home Companion, perhaps this parody Sam Spade, with his meticulously hardboiled utterances, is a pleasure on a radio sketch show but he’s a drag on the screen. Kline shows plenty of technical skill, and his awareness of doing so kills the comedy. Tommy Lee Jones, effortlessly droll, is more fun as the Axeman.
31 July 2021
