A Prairie Home Companion: Movie & DVD Review (2006)

(Originally published 2006)

The new Robert Altman movie, "A Prairie Home Companion," is set within the closed world of radio performed via the stage, with the audience in attendance at St. Paul's F. Scott Fitzgerald Theater watching what will be the last performance of a long-running radio show. Given the ripe possibilities for real theater to explode at such an event, the movie sounds as if might offer the juice of, say, Altman's "Gosford Park."

It doesn't.

"Companion" is as wide open and as gentle as its title suggests. Sometimes you appreciate it for Altman’s typical breezy looseness and disregard for structure. Other times you wish a snake would cut across this "Prairie" and bite somebody on the ankle, if only to liven up a movie seriously in need of dramatic tension.

The film, which screenwriter Garrison Keillor based on his popular public radio program, is little more than a sweetly nostalgic, mildly entertaining diversion. It's best reserved for fans of the radio show, or for its release on DVD.

Its virtue is its cast, which includes the great Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as singing sisters Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson, as well as John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson as two singing cowboys, Lefty and Dusty. Backed by Keillor, who plays a mirror image of himself as GK, these five leave the strongest impression in a movie otherwise filled with blank slates.

The thin plot is an afterthought. The theater has been purchased by an out-of-town businessman named the Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones), who cometh to put the kibbutz on the theater and an era. Running security at the joint is Guy Noir (Kevin Kline), who is the only person to have any interaction with the Axeman, not that there's much of it since each actor is squandered here.

Faring no better is an expressionless Virginia Madsen as a ghostly angel of death, who roams the theater's halls cinched into a white trench coat. More Stepford robot than heavenly creation, Madsen’s weirdly disconnected performance is the movie’s biggest letdown. By the end of the film, you wish she would just lose the wooden act, unbutton the coat and flash somebody, if only to shake thing up.

As Streep’s disgruntled daughter, Lola, who writes punchy poems about suicide, Lindsay Lohan slumps in chairs and generally looks unhappy until she's given the chance to sing onstage, where still she struggles to come to life. Maya Rudolph of Saturday Night Live, however, is nicely cast as a pregnant, gum-snapping producer.

Streep, Tomlin and Keillor are the reasons to see the movie--they have their bag of tricks and they dip into them liberally to keep things interesting, at least when they’re onscreen. As for rest of the cast, they are lost within the presumably lost time the movie evokes.

Grade: C