A Prairie Home Companion
With Keillor, Kevin Kline, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Lindsay Lohan, Maya Rudolph, Virginia Madsen, Marylouise Burke, L.Q. Jones, Sue Scott, and Tommy Lee Jones
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It’s also guaranteed a warm reception because the octogenarian Altman, who’s on his 39th feature and his second heart, seems to be making some sort of valedictory statement. He approached Garrison Keillor with the idea of adapting Keillor’s Saturday-night radio revue to the big screen, and the result, a backstage comedy with wall-to-wall country-and-western music, immediately calls to mind Altman’s masterpiece, Nashville (1975). It takes place at the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul during the fictional last performance of the show, which has been canceled by the Texas media conglomerate that broadcasts it. From the opening credit sequence, a landscape of a radio tower against deepening twilight, the movie is preoccupied with death—the death of radio, of regional culture, of one of the company members, and, one might conclude, of Altman himself.
Fine examples abound: barely ten minutes in there’s an extended scene in which the musical duo Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly) pepper Keillor with questions about old-time radio while the long-suffering assistant stage manager (Maya Rudolph) keeps trying to pull him out of the conversation so he won’t miss his fast-approaching stage cue. Altman is a master of verbal polyrhythm, negotiating between two or even three conversations in a single space, and the scene has a musical dexterity rivaling anything the house band plays onstage. But for sheer craft nothing beats the frequent dressing-room colloquies of Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep as another singing duo, Rhonda and Yolanda Johnson, attended by Lohan as Streep’s gloomy teenage daughter. Their ruminations range from their mother’s death to their bad life decisions to dogs that bark in key, and their give-and-take is enhanced to the point of lyricism by Altman’s lazy pans and adroit use of makeup mirrors to create frames within the frame.
The voice-over has survived in movies because it’s such an easy device. But good screenwriters tend to consider it a crutch, and few filmmakers have done more to discredit it than Altman, whose major stylistic innovation has been telling a story through the characters’ overlapping dialogue. In the 70s he used individual microphones to capture each actor’s voice and mixed those voices up and down in the sound track to create a fictional world in sync with contemporary America, at a time when the common purpose of the Depression and war years was breaking down into a cacophony of competing realities. When some of his 70s movies came out they were indecipherable to traditional moviegoers—the sort of people who might retreat to the quiet simplicity of Lake Wobegon—but they had a huge influence on young indie filmmakers, who embraced Altman’s ethic of multiple story lines and multiple voices. It’s all very well for him to mourn the death of old-time radio, but he put a few nails in the coffin himself. v
