Recent viewings

A Prairie Home Companion (2006). The story begins slowly. Like one of Garrison Keillor's slow-voiced monologues, it seems to ramble aimlessly in all directions at great and self-indulgent length before its internal connections and direction become apparent. For a good long while, I wondered whether a plot was ever going to develop. I should have had more faith. Robert Altman's once again telling a story indirectly, as he did in Gosford Park, through the things that characters mention in passing, the glances they give one another, the things that happen in the background, sometimes literally behind the scenes.

It's the last performance of the last radio variety show in America, an alternate-history version of The Prairie Home Companion which has just barely managed to struggle into the twenty first century. Like its real-world counterpart, it's a homey, self-effacing, sometimes-sentimental, sometimes-ironic echo of the radio shows that once entertained and comforted the inhabitants of isolated farms and small towns all across the land in the days before television's baleful glowing eye consumed the world of popular culture. Unfortunately, the family that kept it going for years has sold its home, the Fitzgerald Theater, to a philistine corporation from Texas which finds it expedient to bulldoze the theater and replace it with a parking lot.

The show's performers and musicians react to its impending end in different ways. Garrison Keillor's character -- practically indistinguishable from his real-world persona -- is blase to the point of hardly even acknowledging that this may be his last evening in the role that has defined him through most of his adult life. The two singin' cowboys, Dusty and Lefty, have their own issues to deal with. There's a pair of singing sisters who don't always agree; a faded romance that may still have a spark or two left; an aging singer whose career is probably ending with the show; and a petulant teenager who resents being dragged along to a show that doesn't feature songs about her favorite topic, suicide.

In the film's second-biggest departure from our reality, Guy Noir has escaped from fiction and been embodied as a somewhat seedy former detective, played by Kevin Kline, who's given up the investigative business for a steady job working security at the theater. It's a dull job, but one that keeps him in cigarettes and gin. Not too challenging. But on this, the last night of the show, something strange is going on. A mysterious, beautiful woman has been seen lurking about the theater. Is she a danger? A fan of the show? A psycho? A stalker? Or perhaps something else entirely? And how can he, shall we say, spend some Quality Time with her?

Tommy Lee Jones puts in a coldly reptilian and thoroughtly hissworthy performance as The Axeman, avatar of the amoral Texas corporation whose impersonal dynamic destruction is poised to dissolve the camaderie and history and good humor of the Prairie Home Companion and wash it away.

Some of the movie's most enjoyable moments play off the difference between what radio audience hears and what's actually going on on stage. At one point, "G.K.'s" much-put-upon personal assistant frantically fumbles through a disorganized stack of her boss's papers, searching for a missing script while he effortlessly vamps to fill the time, improvising an extended paean to one of the show's ubiquitous small-time commercial sponsors while papers tumble and fly in all directions. Other acts encounter similar difficulties, but the show goes on at its leisurely, unhurried pace, while the house band and the amazingly talented sound-effects man effortlessly adapt to the ongoing chaos with the practiced ease of long time professionals.

Like the radio show, the movie is good humored, easygoing, and in no particular hurry to get to any destination, but it's an enjoyable trip. As always on The Prairie Home Companion, the music is a joy to hear, and the sly humor helps keep the sentimentality of the situation and some of the songs from becoming cloying. If the various threads of the plot don't all tie up neatly and explicitly, even if some of them seem to be afterthoughts with no connection to any other threads, well, that's a lot like life itself.