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'Prairie Home' fits well on big screen
Movie Review: A Prairie Home Companion
By John Wirt
jwirt@theadvocate.com
Advocate movie critic
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PLAY OFFICIAL TRAILER
out of 4 stars.
Directed by Robert Altman, the master of ensemble cinema, from a story by Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor and Ken LaZebnik, the film presents a night in the life of the radio show, including on-stage performances and backstage happenings.
Keillor is his wry old self, only you see him as well as hear him. He’s no Brad Pitt, which may explain why he’s in radio. Joshing aside, Keillor has a great voice for radio.
Unlike in the radio show, Keillor’s an ensemble player in the movie. Speaking in his warm, resonant baritone, he welcomes his radio-land audience and in-person crowd at St. Paul’s Fitzgerald Theater. He introduces acts and sings some but, probably because film is a visual medium, tells no lengthy stories. Instead, the movie tells a fictional account of the radio show’s final broadcast.
A Clear Channel sort of corporation has bought WTL, the radio station that airs A Prairie Home Companion. There’s no place in the big-bad world of corporate radio for such an anachronism, so the show has been cancelled and the elegant old Fitzgerald Theater, the program’s home for 32 years, will be razed and paved for a parking lot.
The radio corporation’s imperial ruler travels all the way from Texas to witness the show’s last stand. Tommy Lee Jones plays the heartless capitalist as if he were attending the funeral of some insignificant business rival.
The film casts actors as the musical-comedy show’s featured performers. Fortunately, they’re wonderful thespians who also can sing. Meryl Streep and Altman favorite Lily Tomlin play the folk-singing Johnson Sisters, an aging family act down to just the two of them.
Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly clown around as a feuding, profane cowboy duo, Dusty and Lefty. Kevin Kline — in a performance that suggests that he, rather than Steve Martin, should have starred as Inspector Clouseau in the recent Pink Panther remake — co-stars as the program’s down-on-his-luck security guard, Guy Noir.
In a show of Midwestern pragmatism, Keillor, the person who has the most to lose from the show’s demise, exhibits not a wink of emotion before, during or after the performance. Not so Streep’s Yolanda Johnson. The actress unleashes a splendid display of emotion. Another scene-stealing performance comes unexpectedly from Lindsay Lohan, co-starring as Yolanda’s daughter, Lola. The usually reserved Lola acts as if she’d rather be anyplace but backstage during some corny old radio show.
Also in the sprawling cast are Saturday Night Live’s Maya Rudolph as a hardworking, pregnant stagehand and Virginia Madsen as the mysterious stranger watching over them all. A Prairie Home Companion’s regular musicians and crew play themselves.
It goes without saying that the most obvious audience for A Prairie Home Companion is the show’s loyal public radio listeners. For followers of director Robert Altman, too, this prime-time Altman, his best, most fluid and fun work in years. Flying in the face of the Clear Channels of the world, too, the film transcends that modern-media disease, niche marketing.
