Film review

  • A Prairie Home Companion

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • Deerskin

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Le daim

    Quentin Dupieux (2019)

    Forty-something Georges (Jean Dujardin), whose marriage has recently ended, holes up in a village in the Pyrenees.  This is after he’s deposited his jacket in a garage toilet bowl and parted with north of €7,500 for a replacement – a secondhand deerskin fringed number.  The elderly vendor, Monsieur B (Albert Delpy), throws in an old video camera, though Georges has no use for this, or didn’t think he had.   No sooner has he booked into a hotel – now completely out of cash, he uses his wedding ring to pay a deposit – than Georges introduces himself to two women in the bar as a film-maker.  Both are interested to hear it.  Barmaid Denise (Adèle Haenel) is into amateur film editing.  The other woman (Marie Bunel) is a prostitute who likes the idea of appearing in a porn movie.  Georges is angry that she assumes this is the kind of movie-maker he is, angrier still when he discovers next day that his estranged wife has blocked his access to their bank account.

    Georges decides to tour the village persuading locals to be filmed, each of them making the same solemn renunciation – ‘I promise never to wear a jacket again as long as I live’.  Some even hand their jacket over to the man with the camera.  At the same time, he cultivates a close relationship with his deerskin:  he talks to it and the jacket, thanks to Georges’ primitive ventriloquism, talks back.  Fantasising that he’s the only person in the world to own a jacket, Georges gradually extends his wardrobe.  The hotel receptionist (Laurent Nicolas) commits suicide, wearing a deerskin hat that Georges relieves him of.  Denise, so impressed by the footage Georges is shooting that she offers to finance his project, with funds obtained from her father, buys Georges a pair of suede trousers to match the jacket.  Deerskin gloves eventually follow.  He also stockpiles the garments relinquished by the villagers.  When, one cold night, a passer-by refuses to part with his jacket, Georges kills him.   He then resolves to do the same to others who vowed to dispense with a jacket but didn’t give it to him.  The murder weapon is a ceiling fan blade that Georges has sharpened.  The results are repeatedly gory.

    Increasingly demanding, Denise wants more images from Georges and, in time, to take over as his film’s producer.  This comes as a relief to him.  After he’s driven them up a mountain road, Georges hands the camera to Denise so that she can capture him in all his deerskin glory.  (A herd of fallow deer in the background is an eleventh-hour reminder of who he has to thank for that.)  As he’s posing, someone really does shoot Georges, and fatally.  The gunman is the father of a mute teenager who, near the start of the story, annoyed Georges by watching him film other villagers; Georges threw a stone at the boy, cutting his face.  Denise retrieves the deerskin jacket from Georges’ corpse, and carries on filming.

    As might have been predicted, Quentin Dupieux’s black-comedy horror film has been admired as absurdist, gloriously bonkers, and so on.  Whatever else it may be, Deerskin is, for sure, remarkably pleased with itself.   Its witty leads do their best to resist the smothering smugness of the script and direction.  Jean Dujardin is clearly up for portraying a man losing his mind with more penetration than Dupieux is interested in getting from him.  (The very first scene, when Georges gets rid of his jacket in the garage loo, is perhaps the strongest in the whole film.  His attempt to flush the garment down the toilet is ludicrous but Dujardin conveys a desperate strength of purpose that transcends the silliness.)  Adèle Haenel’s fluent, matter-of-fact credibility keeps her playing of Denise mercifully straight.  Her and Dujardin’s skills can only be small mercies, though.  The writer-director is unquestionably the dominant presence, and a smug and shallow one.  This is epitomised by the emerging look of the film.  As Georges’ preoccupation with his ginger-coloured deerskin grows, a little of its colour seeps into the visuals, making the whole world beige.

    The combination of the items Georges acquires from Monsieur B and the deranged, monomaniacal behaviour that results from owning them might suggest a satire of film-making as an obsessive and potentially amoral tunnel vision.  That doesn’t square, though, with Denise’s accelerating appetite for running the show before she inherits either the camera or the deerskin, neither of which she appears to covet.  You also wonder what happens once the bodies of Georges’ victims are found, and at the complete absence of police, and CCTV, in the vicinity.  This is the beauty, though, of making a movie that’s ‘absurd’ – at least if you’re the kind of wacky brazen showoff Quentin Dupieux appears to be.  You needn’t go to the trouble of making any kind of sense.

    21 July 2021

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