REVIEWED - A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION:Robert Altman's final film is a surprisingly warm and upbeat celebration of the human spirit, writes Michael Dwyer
WHEN Robert Altman shot A Prairie Home Companion in the summer of 2005, it's unlikely that he anticipated it would be his swansong, given that he lived on for a year and half before passing away six weeks ago at the age of 81. Yet the film fuses so many of his motifs and preoccupations over half a century as a director that it can be deemed a summation of his work - which, aptly enough, began when he wrote for radio.
Garrison Keillor's screenplay is founded in his own popular, long-running radio variety show, A Prairie Home Companion, taking dramatic liberties to set the film on what purports to be the programme's final broadcast as it comes under the axe of a corporate executive (Tommy Lee Jones). In the best show business tradition, the show must go on.
It takes place within the Fitzgerald Theatre in St Paul, Minnesota, where the show is performed live before an audience, and the confined settings recall the filmed plays (Streamers, Secret Honor, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) Altman made in the 1980s, when he could not raise bigger budgets for more elaborate productions.
As Altman interconnects the various performers and backstage staff on the Keillor show, his film follows in a direct line from the movies in which he deftly juggled multiple characters, from Nashville and A Wedding in the 1970s to The Player, Short Cuts and Gosford Park in his later years. There are further echoes of Nashville in the use of country music performed by singing actors, and the movie is stamped with Altman's trademark penchant for overlapping dialogue as used in everyday conversation.
Where A Prairie Home Companion differs is in its displacement of Altman's familiar cynicism and caustic humour with hope, optimism and an abiding faith in human nature. The only malice is reserved for Jones's corporate executive, a philistine who has never heard of St Paul native F Scott Fitzgerald after whom the theatre is named. While Altman has ample reason to vent his contempt for the suits that routinely blocked his ambitions, that character is featured only peripherally.
Keillor's droll screenplay feeds the exuberant ensemble cast with witty, natural banter, trading amusingly corny puns and anecdotes exaggerated down the years, although Kevin Kline is saddled with sub-Raymond Chandler hard-boiled lines as the archly named security chief, Guy Noir.
A joyous spirit permeates the many musical numbers, most engagingly when Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin duet as singing sisters and Woody Harrelson and John C Reilly play a singing-and-yodelling cowboy act. Keillor (playing himself) is delightfully deadpan as he sings the ads during the breaks.
This irresistibly appealing entertainment is formed as an elegy for the end of an era - for the radio programme, although it now serves the same poignant function for Altman's life and work.
