I don’t recall exactly how old I was the first time I heard “A Prairie Home Companion” on the radio. It strikes me as one of those things my family just fell into, so familiar that it seemed as though it had always been on the air, and we’d always been listening to it. Perhaps it was during that notable Year Without a Television Set, an insular time when our family entertainment was built around reading books aloud and listening to classic rebroadcasts – “The Life of Riley,” “Johnny Dollar” – on public radio.
I was young enough, however, that the better part of the show was lost on me. I could enjoy the music, some of the clever commercials, that sort of thing, but many of the cast’s swift witticisms slipped past me, and I was always prone to tuning out when Garrison Keillor’s baritone announced that it had been yet another “quiet week in Lake Wobegon,” his fictitious hometown. I simply didn’t have the stamina for Keillor’s monologues or an appreciation of his ability – or so it seemed in radio land – to extemporaneously weave a good story. Instead, I yawned.
Ironically, that’s pretty much the way I feel about director Robert Altman’s entire body of work. Though the old guy’s been a critical darling for the past three decades, virtually everything he’s ever made has struck me as being hopelessly self-absorbed, a paean to his predilection for talk-talk-talk. No one ever does anything in an Altman film; it’s all about people relating to people, falling all over each other in an attempt to be heard and understood. This is fine if you’re the neuroses-laden, The New Yorker-reading, gimlet-swilling social butterfly who watches “Kansas City” or “The Player” and suddenly “understands” jazz music or Hollywood or whatever Altman’s critical eye has focused on this time.
So now I’m looking at the weird fusion of both of these men. Altman and Keillor have collaborated to bring a loosely fictionalized version of “A Prairie Home Companion” to the big screen. I’ve grown up and learned to appreciate Keillor, but developing a fondness for Altman escapes me. So, I’m a bit conflicted, I admit.
Radio, of course, is not a visual medium. But since its inception, “A Prairie Home Companion” has always been more than a mere radio show. Each week, it’s performed before a live audience, frequently in the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minn., where most of the movie was filmed. Keillor and his crew have long since mastered the ability to entertain several hundred pairs of eyes, as well as several million pairs of ears, with enough on-stage antics to keep the paid customers engaged. In the film, the action almost never ventures outside the theater, but Altman has the luxury of taking the audience backstage, both literally and figuratively. We see the barely restrained chaos percolating just beyond the curtains and in the relationships among the cast and crew members.
Then there’s the matter of plot. Altman’s films are less about telling a story and more about the interaction of characters. I’ve got to admit, his style works perfectly in this instance. There are simply too many personalities bounding around the theater to let the action focus on anyone for too long. An overarching circumstance – this is the final performance, as the theater is being sold off – informs everyone’s behavior.
With that much established, Altman winds up the cast members and lets them supply the storytelling. A much-diminished sister act Yolanda and Rhonda (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin) reminisces about the good old days. Singing cowboys Lefty and Dusty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly) go for broke with an unapologetically bawdy routine. Keillor remains the unflappable pater familias, shepherding his cast through one last performance, even as things threaten to collapse.
Finally, there’s the odd case of The Dangerous Woman and Guy Noir. Keillor wrote this picture and Altman directed it, but I can’t determine which I would blame for this odd little story that hovers with bizarre detachment around the rest of the action. Guy Noir is one of Keillor’s fictional characters from the real radio show, animated brilliantly here by Kevin Kline. The film Guy Noir isn’t a fiction; he’s the anachronistic security guard for the theater, lost in a ’40s-era gumshoe novel in his head. He’s captivated by – and suspicious of – a mysterious woman in white (Virginia Madsen) who lurks backstage. She hovers over proceedings like the angel of death, confounding the earnest Noir. Something like the “moral of the story” emerges, and I think it would seem tacked on … if anyone else were inhabiting the roles.
“A Prairie Home Companion” never becomes the tribute to the golden age of wireless as Woody Allen’s “Radio Days” did, but that’s a good thing. Rather than get too lost in sentimentalism, Keillor takes a more pragmatic approach – perhaps it’s that undercurrent of Midwestern Lutheran sensibility tempering everything, including Altman’s “I make art films!” reputation. What results is a pleasant little movie with a few tender moments, a few naughty (but never coarse) jokes and some of the best music since “O Brother, Where Art Thou.” Not a bad day at the Bijou.
Our local NPR station, 90.7 KWMU, is hosting a premier screening of “A Prairie Home Companion” on June 8 at the Moolah Theatre. Tickets are $25; a reception begins at 6 p.m., and the film begins at 7:15 p.m. The movie will start its run at Plaza Frontenac on June 9.
“A Prairie Home Companion” opens and closes at Mickey’s Diner, a bonafide – and registered – historic site. And while the Eat-Rite Diner at the corner of 7th and Chouteau may not have quite the same notoriety, it’s been slinging hash and topping off mugs ’round the clock for just as long. Hop onto a barstool and order up anything from biscuits and gravy to a T-bone steak, then breathe in the ever-present aroma of sizzling butter and steaming coffee. It’s good eats, real cheap … and that’s sensible eating from St. Louis to St. Paul and everywhere in between.
This article appears in May 1-31, 2006.