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Customer Reviews of A Prairie Home Companion

Bittersweet Portraits of People Facing the Final Curtain -- and Altman's Last Film
It's an amusing mixture of fiction and reality. The `last broadcast' of America's radio show hosted by "G. K." real Garrison Keillor is deftly directed by Robert Altman with an on-stage show that features celebrated Hollywood actors including Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly, L.Q. Jones and Lindsay Lohan, and the show's real cast and musicians. "A Prairie Home Companion" is all about the radio show of the title in the Fitzgerald Theater affectionately depicted by Altman. <
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>There is not much to tell in the film except that as a certain big company bought the radio station of the town, and it will be the last show for everyone tonight. A mysterious lady in white (Virginia Madsen) shows up before the PI named "Guy Noir" (Kevin Kline playing the character of the real radio show), and back stories of a few characters are told or suggested (most memorably about the Johnson sisters played by Streep and Tomlin), but nothing big or surprising happens here. <
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>Robert Altman's approach is very simple. Though cowboy singers Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly) are very funny, some may find the entire story slow and boring. I don't blame it. After all, the film is not about the story. <
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>Or not even exactly about the radio show of the title. Like he did in "The Player" he mixes reality with fantasy, and blurs the thin line dividing them to the extent of surrealism. Kline's Guy Noir walks and talks in a slightly exaggerated way against the reality-based background of radio show. Lohan's character casually uses cell phone in the 1950-ish diner as if breaking the entire atmosphere. Even a dead person (or angel) arrives and can talk to mortals. It's Robert Altman, director of fantastic "MASH" and "Gosford Park" and, well, awful "Popeye." His touch could be double-edged, but I think it works in "A Prairie Home Companion." <
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>Altman is always good at handling ensemble cast, and here he shows it again. Using HD cameras that move as if floating in the air, the director guides us through the theater, on stage and at the backstage, and lets us meet the people there. He gives everyone of his ensemble cast a chance to shine, and successfully captures their moment which are sweet, bitter, or both. The film is a tribute to the good, old days that are going, with the tenderly drawn portrait of the people facing the final curtain of their life.

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Like Fine, Aged Bourbon
This movie is a reverie on death. Director Robert Altman unwittingly (perhaps) composed his own elegy with this film. <
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>It is a pensive mix of real and fictional characters who share life's stage, who weave in and out of each other's dialogue. Although there is more of the realistic than the supernatural here. You get what would be a typical Prairie Home Companion broadcast. Garrison Keillor's genius shines through - minus his signature Lake Woebegone report. But the goofy, all-too-apt ads for rhubarb and Minnesota pizza are there. Mostly, the music is there. Traditional folk/country songs are mixed with Keillor's original compositions. The actors do their own singing and all of them perform with heartfelt brilliance. They all could have second careers as song stylists. L.Q. Jones, the perennial Sam Peckinpah villain, delivers an especially moving turn. Meryl Streep has an angelic singing voice, pitch-perfect. <
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>It's the music that blends the real and unreal so beautifully. The result is like sitting down with a mix of bourbon and water at a favorite neighborhood bar. The lovely amber quaff will warm you into a gentle acceptance of the all of it - the raunchy humor, the camaraderie, and eventual death. <
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>Kevin Kline and Robert Altman do the DVD commentary. Their banter almost takes the form of one of Altman's improvised, overlaid film conversations. Kline makes some literary, amusing remarks, asks some pertinent questions. Altman responds a little lamely. But some interesting information about Altman's technique emerges - such as the observation that, in this case at least, Altman strove to make the camera a character "en passant" in the action. <
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>Kline and Altman sort of peter out toward the end of their commentary. But I still think the commentary is probably worth listening to. If for no other reason, it will give you a chance to view this wonderful, mellowing movie a second time. <
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OLD-FASHIONED RADIO HUMOUR FROM MINNESOTA
My Drive-time radio interview on Canberra's Radio 2CC in Australia was going to be about the recently-released (last year - 2006) movie, PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION, a sparkling collage of the final night of an old-fashioned weekly radio programme. I began by telling the Drive presenter Mike Welsh that I'd been to heaven - a Prairie Home heaven - three times. <
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>First was a couple of years ago when I was part of the audience while this wonderful, warm, musical variety show was being broadcast live over Minnesota Public Radio. Next was when I attended a rehearsal which was just as wonderful, ran like clockwork and was no different from the magical live performances. Finally I went to heaven again when I saw the movie itself which is delightfully faithful to this long-and-still-running programme. Now I have my own DVD of the movie. To my mind the brightest star in my Minnesotan heaven is Meryl Streep, who plays a ditzie, ageing, love-lorn country singer in what is really an all-star, fun movie filmed in St. Paul, Minnesota's State capital. St. Paul, by the way, is right next to Minneapolis. <
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>Minneapolis Minnesota may be a mouthful to say, but I have never had any trouble myself with that mid-western tongue-twister since I learnt, as a child growing up in Australia, that I had two cousins living there. (One of my aunts had been a war bride. She married an American sailor at the end of World War ll, and went home with him to the United States.) <
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>Eventually I had to visit. My aunt died, but the cousins kept in touch, I was a long-time fan of Minnesota's great humourist and radio host Garrison Keillor (who plays himself in Prairie Home Companion) and I had enjoyed a spate of movies featuring Minnesota - particularly its people, weather and geography. <
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>First came Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner as a farmer who built a baseball diamond in his corn field. Although the story was set in Iowa, the trusting Costner character travelled briefly to Chisholm, Minnesota. I took note because that is where my cousins now live. <
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>The comedy movie Grumpy Old Men, with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, revealed much Minnesotan snow and ice. Grumpy Old Men confirmed also that the transportable ice-houses Garrison Keillor jokes about really are like over-sized out-houses - with holes in the floor - for ice-fishing on frozen mid-winter lakes. <
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>Minnesota is loaded with lakes. Car number plates simply say: "10,000 lakes". The comic lake-fishing action in G.O.M.'s sequel, Grumpier Old Men, took place in summer. Don't be fooled! An uncle, always a weatherproof fisherman, visited the cousins, went fishing on a mid-summer lake and later complained, "...never been so bloody cold in all my life". When I visited in winter, the cousins took me ice-fishing. I stayed as warm as toast - with several precautionary layers of clothing beneath my snow-suit. <
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>The weather may be cold, aging fishermen may grump, but there is always a friendly warmth to the people, as Garrison Keillor's apocryphal Prairie Home Companion radio stories of small-town, family life in Minnesota demonstrate. He fondly recollects a mythical lake-side town, Lake Wobegone, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above average". <
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>Such positive attributes were less evident in the Coen Brothers' Academy Award winning movie, Fargo. This black comedy-thriller revealed a white and wintry Minnesota as well as, towards the end, one very frozen lake. Fargo may have also proved what Garrison Keillor maintains: Minnesotans value their unforgiving snow-and-ice winters for keeping out troublesome tourists and most no-gooders. <
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>Fargo was followed by Feeling Minnesota, with Keanu Reeves. No lakes, no ice, no snow, but another comedy-thriller - gritty, grotty, more grey than black - about urban sex, violence and larceny. No doubt part of the plot to dissuade non-Minnesotans from visiting, even when it's not winter. <
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>Meanwhile Garrison Keillor sticks to his honesty-is-the-best-policy: "We have only three seasons - either winter is just over, or winter is on the way, or else it's winter!" <
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>Next came a Minnesotan Christmas movie, Jingle All the Way, perhaps intended to repair the damage done by Fargo and Feeling Minnesota. Set in the twin cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul, Jingle All the Way again showed a wintry Minnesota. Arnold Schwartzenegger, who played a hassled father looking for a last minute Christmas present, didn't once take his shirt off to reveal his well-known muscles-most likely because it was too damn cold. <
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>Then North Country, a dark mines-and-courtroom drama, was released in cinemas earlier this year. Based on a true account of the sexual harassment of women mine workers and their long and stressful class-action lawsuit, this movie was largely filmed, not on the summer prairie or the tundra, but on the cold, hard Iron Range of Northern Minnesota - my cousins' neck of the woods. I was in Chisholm when this movie was being made with much ado. Everyone on the Range ("Raynchers" they call themselves) , including the cousins, had connections with the mines and knew many of the players and perpetrators. <
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>PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION now revisits "Minnesota Nice". "Thanks a bunch," say the locals, who would prefer no movies at all to embarrass them while entertaining the rest of the world. Anyhow, when you catch PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION on DVD look out for Mickey's Diner in the opening and closing scenes. I wandered in there after the real radio show for a hot coffee and slice of warm pie but sadly, unlike on the big screen, neither Garrison Keillor nor any of his musical pals were around. Maybe next time ... <
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