A Prairie Home Companion
With Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Garrison Keillor.
US, 2006, 35mm, color, 105 min.
Print source: Warner Bros
Altman’s final curtain call aligns perfectly with that of his onscreen subjects in A Prairie Home Companion, his condensed depiction of a final performance of Garrison Keillor’s beloved Midwestern radio show of the same name. As community portraits go, the film stands out in Altman’s career as uncharacteristically sweet and flattering, a fond elegy to an eccentric troupe of entertainers the likes of which have been largely siphoned out by capitalist mass culture. Tribute is paid in a charmingly choreographed tango onstage—where Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson and Keillor himself, as lightly fictionalized versions of the variety show’s familiar cast, belt out folk ditties—and offstage, where performers frantically prep for airtime while reminiscing about the institution’s healthier days. The atmosphere is electric, and Altman’s camera follows suit, never ceasing its roving movement and rarely shrinking its panoramic viewpoint for fear of missing out on any of the gregarious activity in the theater. Yet in spite of all this positive energy, A Prairie Home Companion ultimately exposes its melancholic heart: an angel of death (an ethereally moving Virginia Madsen) stalks the premises, and later she is one-upped by Tommy Lee Jones’s heartless Texan bureaucrat carrying the threat of a wrecking ball. Altman died only months after the film’s release, and it is hard to think of a more appropriately bittersweet swan song.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson
Vincent & Theo
Fool for Love
Prêt-à-porter
California Split
Thieves Like Us
A Perfect Couple
A Prairie Home Companion
O.C. and Stiggs
That Cold Day in the Park
Corn's-A-Poppin'
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The Gingerbread Man
Dr. T and the Women
Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
