"A Prairie Home Companion"

Garrison Keillor and Robert Altman gather an all-star cast to sing an ode to the good old days and an anthem for the future.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Garrison Keillor, Movies, Robert Altman, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews

Robert Altman on the set of "A Prairie Home Companion"

June 9, 2006 | Robert Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion" is a raggedy dandelion-head of a movie -- shaggier, even, than most Altman movies, considering we're talking about a director who prefers improvisatory flight to strictly defined structure. It's by no means the greatest Altman, and not even a great Altman. And yet, even though it was written and conceived by Garrison Keillor -- as a fanciful fiction that draws on elements of his popular radio show -- it is somehow pure Altman. The way the lines of dialogue nip at one another's heels, the way disparate individuals drift into makeshift families that are both tighter and more contentious than flesh-and-blood ones: Those are Altman's maker's marks, and their presence here is indelible and reassuring.

Those trademarks are so vivid that some longtime Altman fans (and certainly many Altman detractors) may claim that the 81-year-old director is just retracing the territory that made him a maverick in the '70s. What's more, "A Prairie Home Companion" is about the very last performance of a radio variety show -- a show that has miraculously survived for years even in the age of television, a show that, as one character puts it, has been on the air "since Jesus was in the third grade." For that reason alone, some moviegoers may see the picture as an act of desperation: Altman the outmoded cowpoke is getting ready to shamble into the sunset, so why not make a movie about a form of entertainment that's practically outmoded?

But there's a difference between desperation and melancholy defiance. And "A Prairie Home Companion," even with its aura of gentle amiability, is defiant to the core. As both Keillor and Altman have conceived it, this is a movie that lives squarely in the modern world: Far from blissfully ignoring the context of the culture around it, it's painfully aware of that culture's realities. This is a messy, rambling picture; in places, it's maddening. And yet its lackadaisical, conversational quality is something that's missing almost completely from contemporary mainstream filmmaking. So many of the big modern movies feel blueprinted to within an inch of their lives, which is not to say that they're well-written: Sometimes they feel like moving storyboards, pictures that have been mapped out and executed according to a marketing plan, instead of being first made and then marketed. In a world of giant budgets, of endings that are rewritten and reshot three or four times in order to appease test audiences, the kind of improvisatory exploration that Altman has specialized in has become much harder to do.

"A Prairie Home Companion" feels its way along, and trusts we're right there with it. More than anything, Altman seems to be yearning for casualness: for movies that have the feel of life unfolding before our eyes, for movies filled with half-finished conversations that, even in their truncated state, manage to say it all. Those are the kinds of movies -- "M*A*S*H," "Nashville" and, the most passionate of all, "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" -- that Altman used to make, used to be able to make. (And even amid the freedom of the '70s, they were a risk.) "A Prairie Home Companion" isn't in that league. It's a sweet picture, enjoyable enough if you simply choose to glide along its surface. But the implicit whisper behind "A Prairie Home Companion" is that Altman doesn't want either the moviemaking or the moviegoing experience to be scripted to the point of lifelessness. And by the movie's end, that whisper has become a lion's roar.

Here, Keillor plays not himself but a version of himself who goes by the name G.K., a variety-show host who's part ringleader, part ladies' man, and part wry, observant bystander. The show, like the markedly more successful one Keillor hosts in real life, originates from St. Paul. It's a blend of storytelling, musical performances and old-timey commercials with a vaguely dada flair ("Brought to you by the Association of Federated Organizations: Somewhere there's an organization that's right for you"). A Texas radio executive (known, ominously, as Axeman, and played by Tommy Lee Jones) has bought the station that airs the program, and he's about to pull the plug on it. The story -- not really a plot so much as a continuous unfolding of moments, and a relay of interactions between the characters -- takes place on the show's last night, as the cast and crew assemble for the last time.

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