Altman and Keillor Take Companion Home

On a rainy Saturday night deep in the heart of St. Paul, Minnesota, an era is coming to an end. The cast and crew of WCT’s long-running radio variety show A Prairie Home Companion is embarking on what might be their final broadcast before a live studio audience. As fans file into the legendary Fitzgerald Theater, the Texas conglomerate that has purchased the radio station is sending in their hatchet man to bring the troupe’s curtain to a close. But the night is young, the music flows freely and an angel walks the dimly lit corridors of the hallowed theater.

Director Robert Altman (“Gosford Park,” “The Company,” “Short Cuts”) joins forces with writer Garrison Keillor to craft one of the strangest, most bizarre and ultimately uplifting series of stories and vignettes I’ve had the pleasure to see this year. Using the crew, stage and setting of the actual NPR radio show heard September to June, Keillor and Altman create a compact tale that is a surreal fictional counterpart to the real radio show (which, incidentally, is in no danger of leaving the airwaves anytime soon). Hard to describe and even more difficult to categorize, “A Prairie Home Companion” is a head-scratching delight full of charms and idiosyncrasies guaranteed to stand the test of time.

Not that the certifiable weirdness of it all works start to finish. Even more than the actual radio show, this movie is certainly an acquired taste. We’ve got singing cowboys, a security guard-slash-private eye stuck in the 1930’s, an aging amorous folk singer, a laidback wordsmith, a pair of never-been country singing sisters, a suicide obsessed teenage poet and an ethereal Dangerous Woman drifting amongst them all apparently without a single care in the world.

Some of this is genius. Some of it isn’t. All of it added together is such a dreamy delight moving splendiferously along to the melodies and rhythms of a catchy tune all its own it’s hard not to become captivated by at least some of its multifarious strands. Like many Altman pictures, what’s happening on the right side of the frame is just as important as what is taking place on the left, trying to follow both at once an exciting adventure in and of itself.

The majority of the superstar cast is wonderful, diving into it all with exuberantly exhilarating aplomb. In a sea of standouts, for me the greatest joy is watching Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, playing the country signing Johnson sister Yolanda and Rhonda, bounce off one another so effortlessly. Once two parts of a family quartet that never managed the big time, these two now float from here to there playing county fairs, schoolhouses and local churches happily laying their bonnets inside the dusty confines of Fitzgerald Theater for most of the year to be a part of a radio broadcast they love almost more than life itself. The actresses are certifiably brilliant, each so in tune with the other they finish one another’s sentences as if they’ve been doing it all their lives.

In one of the movie’s more amusing fiction imitating fiction twists, Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly play singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty, two popular characters lifted by Keillor from his radio show. Both men are just great, a pure joy to watch whether they’re bantering backstage, putting on their makeup or standing on stage singing a few of the writer’s rascally witty ribald songs.

I was also taken with popular pop star and actress Lindsay Lohan. She’s Lola, Yolanda’s dryly sarcastic teenage daughter and this, not the forgettable “Just My Luck,” is the actress’ true calling card to more adult roles. She’s just splendid, holding her own with confident ease no matter which of her (justifiably) more lauded costars she’s sharing the screen with.

Admittedly, some of this did make me scratch my head in bewilderment. Keillor brings another of his famed radio characters, private eye Guy Noir, into the film, and while I’m sure Kevin Kline is having a ball playing him I couldn’t help but feel he belonged in a far different picture than this one. I’m also not sure I entirely got the point of Virginia Madsen’s angelic Dangerous Woman, the actress fluttering through the thing like an otherworldly dream. While she’s certainly lovely, Altman and Keillor are obviously making some sort of statement about the thin line between life and death I just couldn’t see.

Of course, both men are far smarter (and, in the latter case, a far better writer) then I could ever hope to be. Not that my own envy is going to stop me from lauding them for their bubbly entertaining accomplishment. The script is one of the sharpest, most pointed, most intricately layered comedic masterworks in ages. There is so much going on it is impossible to catch it all in one sitting. Heck, I’ve seen it twice and if I saw it another five times I doubt I’d still catch everything going on inside of it.

The bottom line is that the combination of Altman and Keillor is a match made in cinematic heaven. “A Prairie Home Companion” is blissfully entertaining, full of grace and nuance multi-character comedies just don’t possess anymore. It is an old-school reminder of how good movies can be, and a testament to the stupendous talents of two men sure to be remembered countless generations down the line.