"A Prairie Home Companion"

Some of them, like the wonderful, fluttery character played by Marylouise Burke, known as Lunch Lady, just can't believe the show is ending; others, like the sister act played by Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin (their names are Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson), are wistful but vaguely resigned, as if they feel lucky the show survived even as long as it did; and others, like Maya Rudolph's cranky, briskly efficient and heavily pregnant assistant stage manager Molly, just want the show to run smoothly, whether it's the last night or not. And for most of them -- from the seemingly uncomplicated singing-cowboy act, Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly), to the crotchety-sweet croaky crooner Chuck Akers (played by the wonderful veteran actor L.Q. Jones) -- the routine of showmanship is what they love most about their work. They're not about to let their last night of performing get mired in sentimentality.

Commerce may be what's bringing this show to an end. But is the intrusion of commerce a fate worse than death? It's something of a minor spoiler to tell you (and please stop reading here if you're sensitive to such things) that one of the spectators watching this last show from the wings is an angel who looks like a woman -- a Dangerous Woman, in fact, and that's the name she goes by. Dangerous Woman is played by Virginia Madsen, a luminous bombshell in a white trenchcoat: With her down-to-earth breathlessness, she's a spiritual descendent of Barbara Stanwyck. Dangerous Woman has come to earth on a mission, and not even the down-on-his-luck '40s-style gumshoe, Guy Noir (Kevin Kline, in a performance of supremely offhanded elegance), who handles security for the show, can stop her -- although he's so smitten with her that he doesn't really try to, anyway.

So there you have it: An 81-year-old filmmaker gives us a movie in which the Angel of Death appears as a film noir goddess. The concept alone is a good indicator of how well Keillor's and Altman's sensibilities mesh. (It probably doesn't hurt that both are Midwesterners.) "Youth" also makes an appearance in "A Prairie Home Companion" in the guise of Lola Johnson (Lindsay Lohan), Yolanda's disgruntled teenage daughter, a writer of florid death poetry who will, on this last night of the show, get a chance to perform for the first time. The old guard must give way to the new.

Whatever "A Prairie Home Companion" has to say about aging, about death, about the mutability of art, is never stated outright: And yet it's all there in the picture's rambunctious collage of moods. (Ed Lachman's cinematography unifies those shifting tones beautifully.) Altman and Keillor aren't interested in planting their ideas; they're content to let them drift, from background to foreground and back again. The movie suggests that our most random thoughts, the ones that cross our minds in dumb, meandering patterns when we're supposed to be doing something serious and important, actually are important. There's a lovely backstage scene in which Yolanda and Rhonda chatter about their career, trading non sequiturs that interlock with a surreal "click." Lola sits nearby, rolling her eyes. And spontaneously, Streep's Yolanda begins singing: "Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling," goes the tune -- it's an old Methodist hymn, one that's frequently played during the altar call, and also at funerals. As Yolanda sings, in her quavery, pale-amber voice, she rolls her chair over toward her sister and wraps her arms around her. Streep and Tomlin are lovely here -- they seem to be giving one performance, jointly, a kind of Frick-and-Frack harmonized improvisation. The friction between the characters throws off sparks of love.

Keillor, the movie's master of ceremonies, isn't so much an actor as a presence, but he's an unassumingly mighty one. With his high, brainy forehead and question-mark eyes, he looks a bit like one of the Brownies, the mischief makers and doers of good deeds drawn by the Victorian-era cartoonist Palmer Cox. His G.K. listens, half-seduced and half-bemused, as the Dangerous Woman explains that, before she became an angel, she was a big fan of his show. In fact, she tells him, she was actually listening on the night she died, while she was driving to meet her lover: She laughed so hard at one of his dumb jokes that she swerved off the road. "Because of your story, I lost control and I died," she tells him, brightly, as if she were writing him a standard fan letter. "So you killed me in a way. Isn't that interesting?" G.K. responds the way any sensible person would: By raising an eyebrow -- because what could he possibly say?

That's a wonderful, sideways-slanted fragment, the kind of semi-meaningless exchange that Altman likes to use to get us, and himself, thinking. Altman, his fairly recent heart transplant notwithstanding, knows he can't go on forever, and "A Prairie Home Companion" is the kind of corny-joke memorial that a director responsible for lines like "If a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass so much" (from "McCabe & Mrs. Miller") might concoct for himself.

Altman has become a symbol of the old guard to younger moviegoers who are sick of hearing the old-timers (and older critics) go on about his glory days. I hate to frame the argument as a disparity between the old and the young. I don't believe the number of moviegoers who truly care about movies has diminished that much since the '70s. But the parameters of what we get to see, and how it's presented to us, have changed drastically. For many lovers of movies, the Netflix queue has become the polar North of our moviegoing habits.

Given the range of movies being made in America today -- along all the gradations of the indie scale, and sometimes even in Hollywood -- it's absurd to claim that the time for doing great work is over. But doing great work, and getting it seen, is certainly harder than ever, and I believe Altman is facing that reality head-on in "A Prairie Home Companion," not so much for his sake, but for ours. He knows that after he's gone, that's one of the challenges we'll be left with.

One of the things that has always bothered me about the critics locked in the "golden age of the '70s" mentality is that they ended up treating filmmakers like Altman and Scorsese and Coppola as the end of something, rather than a beginning. The message to everyone born after 1960 was, "You shoulda been there, kids -- it was great. But it's all over now."

But even if Altman, in "A Prairie Home Companion," seems wistful for the days when filmmaking was done, and watched, differently, I suspect he doesn't have as much reverence for the '70s as many critics do. His sense of community is too strong to want to shut people out of experience -- as a filmmaker (and even as a maker of sometimes not-so-great movies), hasn't his lifelong goal been to draw them into it?

And so, late in "A Prairie Home Companion," by the time the whole ensemble takes the stage to sing "In the Sweet By and By" -- a song that is, in the strictest sense, about moving optimistically toward the afterlife, but one that could also be simply about striding toward the uncertainty of the future -- it becomes clear that this movie isn't just a lament for the past, a case of an old man making a movie about olden times. Altman, along with his cast, is singing for all of us, for those of us who continue to love movies no matter how often we get burned. Maybe we're dinosaurs. But we're all dinosaurs, together.

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