Movie Review: A Prairie Home Companion

A Prairie Home Companion (2006) 

Directed by Robert Altman 

Written by Garrison Keillor 

Starring Woody Harrelson, Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Garrison Keillor, Lindsay Lohan, John C. Reilly, Kevin Kline

Release Date June 9th, 2006 

Published June 8th, 2006 

Words like quaint and charming are anachronistic in this day and age. They are anathema to modern audiences bred on irony and detached perspective. Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion has always been of another time. A time when quaint and charming were far from insulting, they were the height of faint praise, as Keillor himself might say.

Now that A Prairie Home Companion has been brought to the big screen, under the direction of the legendary Robert Altman, you might fairly assume that it has been somehow updates, jazzed up somehow for modern audiences. That is thankfully not the case. A Prairie Home Companion is as old fashioned as has always been on Minnesota Public Radio and the throwback nature is one of the films many great pleasures.

In the era of irony a little earnest homespun humor is just the thing to warm your heart and give you a good tickle. It's the last night for the cast and crew of A Prairie Home Companion. For 30 some years the WLD radio variety show has emanated from the Fitzgerald theater in St Paul Minnesota. However, now that the longtime heritage station has been sold to a major corporate chain, the show's over.

This is distressing news to long time performers like the Johnson Sisters, Yolanda (Meryl Streep) and Rhonda (Lily Tomlin) who have performed on the show since it's inception. Yolanda's late husband was the inspiration for the show and Yolanda had hoped her daughter Lola (Lindsey Lohan) might one day perform there one day.

Also distressed at losing their regular gig are the singing cowboys Dusty (Woody Harrelson) and Lefty (John C. Reilly) whose ribald tunes about life on the plains are one of the shows humorous highlights, unless your the shows harried producer worried about FCC violations.

Seemingly unaffected by the sadness of the last broadcast is the shows longtime host G.K (Garrison Keillor) who is intent on making the very last show just like the first one. Refusing any attempt at evoking audience sympathies, G.K will not say thank you or goodbye in any kind of grand fashion. Why even when one of the shows older performers passes away in his dressing room mid-show G.K refuses an on air eulogy telling the cast that if he were to start eulogizing his friends at his age he wouldn't stop till he was dead himself.

Lurking in the background backstage is the shows head of security an oddball right out of a fifties private eye movie the aptly named Guy Noir (Kevin Kline) when he's not watching the door or providing a running commentary, Guy searches for a mysterious blonde in a trench coat only known as A Dangerous Woman (Virginia Madsen).

Saturday Night Live's Maya Rudolf and the real life band and singers of the radio show A Prairie Home Companion round out the cast of this deliciously simple showbiz comedy. Simple in terms of smart character driven humor and old school showbiz pizazz.

Lurking behind this behind the scenes comedy is a bizarre whimsy that is pure Robert Altman. In bringing to life Garrison Keillor's radio show, Altman has brought literal life to some of his fictional characters including the aforementioned Dusty and Lefty and most importantly Guy Noir who has long been Keillor's favored creation outside the denizens of the fictional town of Lake Woebegone.

Guy's whole persona and function in the film are a delightful mixture of detective movie parody and straight comedy and in the person of Kevin Kline these elements reach a near symphony level of comic timing and perfection. Kline is more than worthy of a supporting actor nomination as the standout of this brilliant ensemble.

Meryl Streep provides the emotional center of A Prairie Home Companion. Yolanda is more than just a performer on the show, in the films history her family is entwined in the history of the show. Her husband was G.K's partner before he passed on. Yolanda herself was for a time entwined with G.K and her daughter has been coming to the show with her since birth.

Her colorful history, only alluded to, colors the film and brings depth to the emotions that resonate from her especially while on stage with her voice breaking belting out the same old time gospel songs she and her sister have sang on the show for years.

Streep's performance is not perfect. She along with Harrelson and Reilly occasionally betray their performances by allowing Hollywood affectations to leak through their Midwestern patois. Overall though the performances are universally strong.

Maybe most surprising of all is Garrison Keillor. Playing himself is certainly the kind of comfort zone any actor can thrive in but Keillor does truly impress with his deft wit and comic timing. Anyone who listens to his real life show on a regular basis will likely recognize that this is typical Garrison Keillor but the uninitiated will likely be very impressed with the his sleight of hand phraseology and warm charismatic nature.

In his most recent directorial effort the ballet drama The Company Robert Altman directed as if the whole thing bored him. The director was constantly allowing the camera to wiggle around and wander away from the actors, when they weren't dancing. It was as if he were directing from a script he didn't much care for and simple set the camera and walked away when he wasn't enjoying the ballet performances.

A Prairie Home Companion is a return to form for the great director. Fully engaged and even modestly excited about this smart, homespun material, Altman seems to delight in every last detail from Keillor's wacky fake product commercials to the style of Kevin Kline's haircut meant match that of a bust of the great F. Scott Fitzgerald whose bust is prominently displayed in the theater that is named for him.

A Prairie Home Companion is a masters class in Altman's managed chaos style. The film floats backstage to look in on Guy Noir and the backstage happenings and then simply glides back on to the stage for another song and a story. The flow is hypnotic when it's not laugh out loud funny. This is one of Robert Altman's best efforts in a very long while.

Quaint and charming may be curse words in this day and age but not in relation to this wonderfully quaint charming comedy from a master director and a master storyteller. A Prairie Home Companion is one of the best films of the year.

Movie Review The Company

The Company (2003) 

Directed by Robert Altman 

Written by Barbara Turner 

Starring Neve Campbell, Malcolm McDowell, James Franco 

Release Date December 26th, 2003 

Published January 12th, 2004 

The appeal of Robert Altman has always been somewhat esoteric. Not since MASH in 1970 has Altman had a film that could be called a commercial success, yet he continues to work steadily turning out quality work every other year or so. The delightful Gosford Park was Oscar nominated which is one of the reasons why studios and financiers are always willing to take a chance on him. Altman's work always has a prestigious feel as if just because he directed it the film has a shot at an Oscar. Altman's latest work, the ballet drama The Company has that same air of prestige to it but lacks the narrative coherence and sharpness of wit that made Gosford Park an Oscar nominee.

Neve Campbell stars in The Company as Loretta Ryan, Ry to her friends and family. Ry is a rising star at the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago where the manic artistic director Alberto Antonelli or Mr. A as he's called (Malcolm McDowell) runs a somewhat out of control ship. Managing everyday on the edge of financial chaos, and more importantly the ego chaos of his stars, Mr. A must train his dancers and hold financiers at bay all the while flitting in and out rooms to avoid serious confrontations.

Ry has just broken up with one of the dancers in the chorus and is beginning a tentative romance with a chef at a local restaurant, Josh (James Franco). In one of the film's most fascinating scenes, set in a bar around a game of pool, Altman lays out Ry and Josh's courtship without words. The two communicate only with their eyes until the next scene when Ryan and Josh wake up next to each other in Ry's apartment. It's not entirely wordless, it's just that Altman has little interest in what the characters have to say to each other, he just wants it all implied and accepted so that he can get back to the ballet.

Aside from Ry, Josh and Mr. A, the cast is made up of the dancers from the real Joffrey Ballet in Chicago. Not actors by training, Altman smartly gives them little dialogue and defines them thinly as stereotypes and archetypes. There is the aging star who can no longer keep up with the younger dancers. There is the teenager with the superstar attitude, talent and stage father and then there are just members of the chorus who struggle to get by and fill in the background.

Altman's camera simply floats through this film without ever really settling on a story that interests him. This may be why there are so many extra plot strands that are begun and tossed aside. A sign that Altman was searching for a story to carry the plot but just never found one, thus he explores as many as he can and then cuts away to a practice or a performance to get away from the plots that just don't appeal to him. This makes the film feel rudderless, like a documentary without a voiceover narration to fill in the blanks of the plot.

The Company is a difficult film to explain. It has a conventional sound to it but Altman is not interested in any of the conventional elements of the script. He's not interested in the romance plot between Campbell and Franco. He is not interested in Mr. A's struggles to raise money and manage his ego backstage. Really he's not interested in anything that isn't happening on the stage.

I cannot speak for Mr. Altman but I got the feeling that he received a rather conventional drama script with romance and the backstage drama of a ballet troupe and decided to do the film despite not being interested in the script. Altman simply sets up his camera and lets it fall on whatever grabs his eye, meanwhile in the corners of the screen behind overlapping, extraneous dialogue there is a conventional Hollywood film going on with a three act script and average dialogue. Altman sets up his camera on a rolling tripod and then walks away to await the next performance on the stage.

Not being a fan of ballet I am in no position to judge whether the performances in the film are any good. We can assume that since these are real dancers for a real and well respected ballet company that they must be pretty good. I can say that Neve Campbell looked pretty good. Campbell conceived the idea for the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Barbara Turner. Campbell does her own dancing in the film and seems to hold her own opposite the pros. Campbell is particularly good in an outdoor performance early in the film. As rain, lightning and thunder kick up she and her partner continue their performance all the way to the end despite the weather.

In the end Robert Altman comes off as a dilettante whose fan interest in ballet overcame his ability to tell a compelling story. That said, I feel there is something deeper in The Company. Indeed Altman seems to really love ballet to the point of ignoring everything else but there is a unique element of experiment here that is interesting. A risky attempt to make a film with as little plot as possible, a minimalist anti-narrative that is antithetical to anything Hollywood would be willing to make. In that sense I find Altman's approach appealing though not the final product of that approach.