“A Prairie Home Companion,” the latest movie by 81-year-old director Robert Altman, seems on the surface enjoyable but slight: a larky little comedy based on Garrison Keillor’s long-running (32 years) public radio variety show, a darkly genial fantasy in which writer-star Keillor and Altman imagine the show’s demise — and, by extension, their own.
But appearances can deceive, especially in an Altman movie.
The film is set almost entirely backstage and onstage, during what’s supposed to be the last live performance of “PHC” at the program’s longtime home, the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul — the night before a brutal Texas corporation comes in and shuts it all down.
Also, of course, there’s the usual Altman all-star guest ensemble, and Virginia Madsen as the Angel of Death, who’s hovering around the theater, waiting to carry off souls.
The result is full of political satire and country music — and one might be tempted to pigeonhole it fondly as, at best, a sort of mini-“Nashville” or a public radio “M*A*S*H,” shot mostly in interiors to make it easier on the octogenarian Altman.
But that view shortchanges the picture. It would be hard not to have a good time at this movie, and I don’t think it’s at all slight. “Prairie” is actually inspiring: a portrait of two maverick artists (Altman and Keillor) thumbing their noses at both death and corporate cruelty — a great movie about art, communities and the liberal side of heartland America, disguised as a jokey little vaudeville about a radio show.
Is the movie really a comic “last” testament? Death has been a constant theme in Altman movies since “M*A*S*H,” which was about people who face it every day. He has killed off heroes, heroines and main characters repeatedly in his films, notably in “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Thieves Like Us,” “Nashville,” “A Wedding” (which begins and ends with deaths), “The Player,” “Short Cuts” and “Gosford Park.” Similarly, “Prairie” is full of references to the Grim Reaper, most of them disconcertingly jocular. But there’s nothing mournful or “last gasp” about Altman’s vision here or elsewhere.
For Altman, art can cheat death, as it does for Van Gogh in “Vincent & Theo.” Whenever he shows a community of artists or entertainers, as he does in “Nashville,” “A Perfect Couple” (the rock group), “Kansas City” and “Jazz 34” (the jazz players), “The Company” (the Joffrey Ballet) or here, it’s almost always with affection — occasionally, as in “Nashville” and “The Player” (about Hollywood), mixed with bile.
Triumph of the spirit
That affection floods over “Prairie Home Companion.” As the show winds down toward the last signoff, the stage and backstage are taken over by the triumphant Altman ensemble. Upstairs in the glass booth, an ice-cold villain may be watching — Tommy Lee Jones as Mr. Cruett, the “Axeman,” the corporate fast gun who’s going to shut them all down. But onstage for their last hours they reign supreme, just as Barbara Harris does when she belts out Keith Carradine’s “It Don’t Worry Me” during the climactic chaos and assassination of “Nashville.”
That’s what Altman and Keillor are showing us: how these “working stiff” entertainers can triumph over death and circumstance.
Like the singers and pickers in “Nashville,” the performers and backstage people in “Prairie” use music as a defense against the world. Like the hip combat surgeons and nurses in “M*A*S*H,” they are so good that nothing can faze them — not even when one performer dies backstage or a lover’s quarrel erupts onstage, or there are suddenly six minutes to fill and Lindsay Lohan as Meryl Streep’s daughter Lola has to make an impromptu radio debut. (Lola’s suicide poetry, recited throughout the film, also reminds us of “M*A*S*H,” of the theme song “Suicide Is Painless,” composed by Johnny Mandel with lyrics by Altman’s then-teenage son, Mike.)
“Prairie Home” is as much about mortality as it is about radio, something that becomes clearer when one of the show’s cast, the hyperactive Romeo C&W singer Chuck Akers (L.Q. Jones) bites the bullet, and Madsen’s Angel of Death hovers over him. But we really shouldn’t define the picture as Altman’s last testament. He and his work never seem old; “The Company,” his previous movie, was about youth and renewal. And Altman has made it clear that he’ll probably have to be dragged away from the movie sets, that he really doesn’t want to do anything else. He is already making plans for his next project, a dramatic feature based on the car documentary “Hands on a Hard Body.”
Indeed Altman, who revealed onstage during his career Oscar presentation in March that he had had a heart transplant, had to get a standby director, Paul Thomas Anderson (“Boogie Nights”) to hang around for the insurance companies, in case he became ill. (Stephen Frears performed the same task in “Gosford Park.”)
Ingmar Bergman, a genuine Altman directorial idol, made 1982’s “Fanny and Alexander” a genuine last testament (although he went on to write or direct more than a dozen films afterward). But I believe Altman when he says he’ll never quit — even if he runs out of standbys. To mangle Mark Twain a bit, the reports or hints of his death or farewell are greatly exaggerated. “I do not intend to retire at all,” he recently told Entertainment Weekly. “Someone may retire me, but I’m not going to have anything to do with it.”
Like almost all of Altman’s best movies, including “M*A*S*H,” “The Player” and “Short Cuts,” “Prairie Home” is an irreverent ensemble piece. Its magic, as with the others, lies in the ensemble itself. Altman always says he loves and admires his actors, giving lie to the frequent complaint that he has contempt for his characters. But it’s doubtful he has ever shown more love for a cast than he does here.
No good guys, bad guys
There’s no overt sentimentality during “Prairie.” This isn’t a film where the good guys inevitably win and the bad guys unfailingly fail — although one bad guy does meet his maker, decisively. But it’s a movie that lets us fall in love with its characters in a tough spot as we usually do with the casts of movies such as “Casablanca,” “The Rules of the Game,” “Rio Bravo” and of previous Altman ensemble films such as “M*A*S*H,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” and “Gosford Park.”
Love is the word. If you don’t feel any watching the radio people here — especially Streep’s beatifically smiling Yolanda and Lily Tomlin’s tart Rhonda warbling their special version of “Swanee River” — then you’re missing the magic of radio, Garrison Keillor and the movies. And of the unkillable Robert Altman.
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mwilmington@tribune.com
