In grappling with Robert Altman’s latest human wave drama it will help if you are already a Garrison Keillor fan.
If you have not heard the radio show “A Prairie Home Companion,” on at least one of the 550 radio stations that carry it, you might be better off renting Altman’s “MASH,” “Nashville” or “Short Takes” for the tenth time and leaving it at that.
If you do not appreciate Keillor’s understated dry humor and his make-believe town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, you will spend this 105 minutes trying to figure out what all the fuss is about.
The plot is as thin as they come. It is all about the people, those soft open souls who wear their hearts on their microphones, warbling those sweet tunes even as the walls close in.
The great evil television is one the way in the form of Tommy Lee Jones, the Axeman, (‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,’ ‘Men in Black’) and he is not going to take no for an answer.
Radio is dead and it’s time to clear away the bodies.
The beloved Fitzgerald Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota, home base for the radio show since 1978, is being demolished to make way for a parking lot (Garrison, you owe Joni for that...). A Dangerous Woman (Virginia Madsen—‘Sideways’) is walking through the theatre, welcoming it to the hereafter and Oscar winner Guy Noir (Kevin Kline—‘A Fish Called Wanda’) knew those yams meant trouble the minute he set eyes on them.
But there’s nothing he can do. The theatre and everybody in it are turning into ghosts before our very eyes, radio waves dissipating into the ether; echoing through the empty back-stage dressing rooms as assistant stage manager Maya Rudolph makes those stage calls for the last time.
The bad thing about “Companion” is that it is stuck with a format that is incapable of chemistry with any of the actors except perhaps Lily Tomlin.
Meryl Streep, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly and Kline provide the usual excellent performances, but they skim over the top of the show instead of becoming immersed in it. They are too obviously guests on the show, instead of real performers.
On the other hand, having Robin and Linda Williams perform on stage is a stroke of genius. They are as real and embracing as their presence is unsettling.
Is this real or is this a movie? Is this the show or is this backstage behind the show?
Real life “Prairie” sound effects master Tom Keith and actual stage manager Tim Russell are there too, simultaneously in and out of costume. Real as life can be.
So we have Garrison and the Williams’ from the actual show playing the actual show, Keith and Russell on stage, but actually backstage, Streep, Tomlin, Harrelson and Reilly being stage actors playing radio actors, Kevin Kline playing an undercover gumshoe who everybody knows, Virginia Madsen playing a ghost that only half of the people can see, L.Q. Jones who becomes a ghost that nobody sees and Lindsay Lohan playing a singer who writes poems about death and is afraid to sing but does anyway.
The cinematography by Edward Lachman (‘The Virgin Suicides,’ ‘Far From Heaven’) is sterling. He does great close-up work in the dressing rooms cubby holes and crowded back stage confines of the Fitzgerald.
The sound track is as good, or as bad, as the radio show itself. Take it or leave it.
Tom Waits and Lyle Lovett were originally slated to play singing cowboys Lefty and Dusty instead of Harrelson and Reilly but the latter two are better anyway.
It would have only detracted from the irrational madness of the whole affair to have actual singers singing in the make-believe characters of the cowboy duo. In the real PHC one routine tells us that cowboy life is not all that romantic, really, and is basically loneliness terminated by unmarked death at the hands of a wondering psychopath.
Keillor himself knows how to write about death and Altman knows how to show it on screen.
“Retirement? You’re talking about death, right?” says the 80 year old director for whom suicide is not painless. Let’s hope he goes down swinging with more like this one.
Thoroughly enjoyable from beginning to end.
Limited engagement opens June 9th MPAA rated PG-13 for risqué humor
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