Garrison Keillor has made a career out of telling rambling, folksy tales and singing rambling, folksy songs on the NPR show that bears the same title as this film. The show has run almost continuously since 1974 the same year Altman shot the brilliant country music satire Nashville just down the road. As a storyteller, Keillors gift is making myth of the mundane. Altmans, in many ways, is making mundane out of myth, wrangling big stories and big casts into bite-sized, indelible moments.
A Prairie Home Companion brings these two charmingly fusty raconteurs together in a gentle comedy about the fictional last broadcast of the real radio show. The screenplay was written by Keillor and shot in the shows real home, the Fitzgerald Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota. While Keillor and many of his regular radio pals work through the broadcast, the news spreads backstage that the theatre has been bought out and the shows about to close. Its an Altman film through and through, a cross-stitched sampler of American life injected with meaning, humility and subdued humour by a uniformly good, suitably low-key cast.
Kevin Kline gets chuckles as Guy Noir, a punctilious backstage security guard who narrates the movie in his wannabe guise as a hard-boiled gumshoe. Virginia Madsen, credited as "the dangerous woman, plays the aptly named Asphodel, gracious angel of death. Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin have warm chemistry and duet sweetly as the aging, misty-eyed Johnson Sisters. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly enjoy themselves thoroughly as a couple of singing trail hands whose hokey, jokey songs about Viagra and boobs give the stage manager minor conniptions. Even Lindsay Lohan underplays the rebellious teen with more charm than strum: in her suicide-obsessed poetry, she refers to the man upstairs as "G-d.
Theres no plot to speak of, and no greatly profound message to be derived, except perhaps that at 81 years old, Altman feels it timely to remind us that, sweetly and tenderly, even the best things must end. (Alliance Atlantis)
A Prairie Home Companion brings these two charmingly fusty raconteurs together in a gentle comedy about the fictional last broadcast of the real radio show. The screenplay was written by Keillor and shot in the shows real home, the Fitzgerald Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota. While Keillor and many of his regular radio pals work through the broadcast, the news spreads backstage that the theatre has been bought out and the shows about to close. Its an Altman film through and through, a cross-stitched sampler of American life injected with meaning, humility and subdued humour by a uniformly good, suitably low-key cast.
Kevin Kline gets chuckles as Guy Noir, a punctilious backstage security guard who narrates the movie in his wannabe guise as a hard-boiled gumshoe. Virginia Madsen, credited as "the dangerous woman, plays the aptly named Asphodel, gracious angel of death. Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin have warm chemistry and duet sweetly as the aging, misty-eyed Johnson Sisters. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly enjoy themselves thoroughly as a couple of singing trail hands whose hokey, jokey songs about Viagra and boobs give the stage manager minor conniptions. Even Lindsay Lohan underplays the rebellious teen with more charm than strum: in her suicide-obsessed poetry, she refers to the man upstairs as "G-d.
Theres no plot to speak of, and no greatly profound message to be derived, except perhaps that at 81 years old, Altman feels it timely to remind us that, sweetly and tenderly, even the best things must end. (Alliance Atlantis)
