Garrison Keillor has become something of a national institution for more than 30 years of writing and hosting the folksy radio program A Prairie Home Companion.
The show, broadcast from the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul and heard around the country on National Public Radio, focuses on life and its foibles in the Midwest and Minnesota in particular, as filtered through Keillor's peculiar sense of wit and wisdom. In addition to its house band, there are musical guests, imaginary sponsors that promise listeners the moon and the adventures of such weekly characters as the Raymond Chandler-style private eye Guy Noir and saddle tramps Dusty and Lefty.
Trying to get all that into a movie -- the radio show has made occasional appearances on PBS-TV -- would seem a daunting effort. Who wants to watch a radio show, after all, even if it does have a large theater audience?
But Keillor has turned his brainchild into the film A Prairie Home Companion which, as directed by Robert Altman, captures the flavor of the show while encircling it with a crazy quilt of offbeat characters. The idea is that the long-running show is putting on its final episode after its home radio station has been sold to a wealthy bottom-line Texan and its theater home is facing demolition.
Dusty, Lefty, Guy Noir and a raft of other characters turn up in an all-star cast that includes Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Lily Tomlin, Lindsay Lohan, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly, Tommy Lee Jones as a coolly shrewd Texan and Virginia Madsen as a mysterious woman in a trenchcoat who is listed as "Dangerous Woman" in the credits. "She wore a pure white trenchcoat, so white rain would be embarrassed to fall on it," says Kline as Guy Noir. "Dangerous Woman" turns out to be the film's lynchpin, turning up at critical moments in the lives of characters, sometimes unseen by them even as she flits around the fringes of the stage and their lives. You'll soon be able to figure out her purpose, though I won't spoil the surprise. Madsen plays her as a warm, eerily welcoming figure of beguiling charms.
In truth, not a lot really goes on in A Prairie Home Companion, which has the ensemble feel of Altman's Nashville, if not exactly the put-down skewering status of M*A*S*H. Listeners to Keillor's show will undoubtedly love this behind-the-scenes look at the program, but even those who've never heard it will be able to immediately relate to the second-tier dreams of its characters. "We're sort of like the Carter Family, only not famous," Streep's Yolanda Johnson says in describing her singing act with sister Rhonda (Tomlin), their other two sisters having departed show business some time ago, one of them under awkward circumstances. Yolanda still hopes her pretty daughter, Lola (Lohan), will carry on the act, but Lola keeps writing poetry about suicide rather than songbirds.
The kindly, round-faced Keillor -- not a face made for the movies -- is the show's host, introducing the not-quite-wonderful acts and having fun doing commercials about the joys of duct tape.
Harrelson (Dusty) and Reilly (Lefty) have some of the funniest moments, telling a series of off-color jokes in a boyishly folksy way.
Kline plays Guy Noir with the intensity of a '30s pulp fiction detective, watching over the theater's back door so intruders won't get in, trying to figure out who the Dangerous Woman is and then being taken aback when he discovers her secret.
Altman uses his trademark technique of having people talk over each other, like in real life, although it can be disconcerting at first in a too-long backstage sequence in which Streep and Tomlin as the Johnson Sisters recall old times and sing songs that are not quite as funny as they seem to think.
But A Prairie Home Companion is, like Keillor's radio show, a homey, friendly kind of film that has a surprising little kick at the end. When it's over you'll feel just as sorry as the radio stars that their show has come to an end.
mjanuson@projo.com / (401) 277-7276
****
A Prairie Home Companion
Starring: Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Garrison Keillor, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, L.Q. Jones.
Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes.
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