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A Prairie Home Companion
Jun. 20th, 2006 06:08 pmWhen I was a kid, on roadtrips across Kansas and Missouri to various places in the US of A, my Dad would switch the dial past all those country-western channels and radio talk jerks, to National Public Radio and The Prarie Home Companion. We'd drift asleep, my brother and I, sometimes on each others shoulders, sometimes against the windows on opposite sides of the station wagon, listening to Garrison Keller's raspy whisper tell jokes, sing songs, and introduce a variety of acts. Found it oddly comforting at the time, a soft midwestern rasp and twang. Most people, I've learned, with only a few exceptions, aren't fond of change, like to stick with what they know, enjoy habit and routine and prefer the nostaliga of earlier simpler times. It is why we have so many retrospectives. There is just something comforting about what is known.
Robert Altman's film A Prairie Home Companion captures that type of comfort. The simple values of simple folk with a routine of repeated jokes, repeated acts, and repeated actions. Life may move past them, but they remain forever stuck in that simpler, easier time, safe and comfortable in their routine until of course the ax-man comes and tells them it is guitting time.
Like most Robert Altman films, notably Godsford Park, Nashville, Short Cuts and MASH, A Prarie Home Companion does not have a straight narrative or plot-line, it wanders, with a variety of rambling conversations and subplots that somehow come together and somehow do not. For Altman views life as one long movie and attempts to capture the stream of consciounsness of it on film. He is to the cinema, what James Joyce, William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were to the novel. When you go to an Altman film you should not expect to see the story laid out with a precise beginning middle or end or even expect a plot at all, but more a couple of hours listening to a myriad of interacting short stories taking place within a precise moment of time.
Altman's gift lies in his camera angles and shots, his ability to let the actors improvise and to capture through the improvization moments of camouflagued reality. One scene, between two singing sisters (Streep and Tomlin) and Streep's daughter, portrayed by a blond Lindsay Lohan, is shot entirely through the dressing room mirror. As if we are standing behind the actors watching their reflections within it. Seeing their reflection as opposed to their reality.
The entire film takes place within one evening - with the possible exception of the very beginning and the very end - which take place years later and book-end the film. The evening is the last performance of Prarie. Their last hurrah before the ax-man takes over their old theater and send them on their way. We watch the events unfold during that evening in real time, including on air flubs and unexpected but not overly traumatic tragedies.
The film in tone and style is much like Garrison Keller's delivery of his radio show, soft, raspy, down home comfort. 'Nothing has changed since the 1950's, if I didn't know any better, I'd think I'd gone back in time,' mutters the ax-man watching the show from a special box at the top of the theater. He's shocked such a thing remains in an age of Tivo and Ipod and video-taped reality shows such as American Idol. This is live? He asks. Thinking aloud it should be taped for prosperity, then tucked in a vault.
And Altman comments on the desire to preserve that simpler time, the desire to unwind to Keller's commericial jingles and gospel tunes and jokes. To drift, sleepy-eyed, as the voice echoes in your head and miles pass outside your window, much as my brother and I did. But, by the same token, life moves on. Change happens. While it can be preserved, it can not continue indefinitely. The theater will be torn down and the acts will go on the road, until the angel of death comes a calling.
That said, Prairie does continue on NPR, and may well do so until Keller dies. It only ends in the film - symbolizing perhaps both the ending of a time in the human consciousness and the nostalgic desire to preserve or return to it. A desire that is by no means restricted to one nationality or one segment of the US.
Did I like the film? One does not so much like an Altman film as allow oneself to succumb to its ebb and flow. I found it comforting. Sleepy. Peaceful. Much like a drive across country with my family as a child. The friend I saw the film with, commented afterwards, "you can't grow up in the Midwest without hearing a Prarie Home Companion..." except radio crosses boundaries, and I've heard Keller's rasp in South Carolina and New York, on road trips or just on a lazy drift around the radio dial while in a friend's apartment. The film is no more or less than what it intends to be - being backstage and front while Keller does his last broadcast of his long-running radio show in a world where radio is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. And in a summer of exaggerated violence,explosions, computer animated animals and objects, it is a moment of sleepy-eyed, positive, peaceful rambling, which from my perspective was just what the doctor ordered.
Robert Altman's film A Prairie Home Companion captures that type of comfort. The simple values of simple folk with a routine of repeated jokes, repeated acts, and repeated actions. Life may move past them, but they remain forever stuck in that simpler, easier time, safe and comfortable in their routine until of course the ax-man comes and tells them it is guitting time.
Like most Robert Altman films, notably Godsford Park, Nashville, Short Cuts and MASH, A Prarie Home Companion does not have a straight narrative or plot-line, it wanders, with a variety of rambling conversations and subplots that somehow come together and somehow do not. For Altman views life as one long movie and attempts to capture the stream of consciounsness of it on film. He is to the cinema, what James Joyce, William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were to the novel. When you go to an Altman film you should not expect to see the story laid out with a precise beginning middle or end or even expect a plot at all, but more a couple of hours listening to a myriad of interacting short stories taking place within a precise moment of time.
Altman's gift lies in his camera angles and shots, his ability to let the actors improvise and to capture through the improvization moments of camouflagued reality. One scene, between two singing sisters (Streep and Tomlin) and Streep's daughter, portrayed by a blond Lindsay Lohan, is shot entirely through the dressing room mirror. As if we are standing behind the actors watching their reflections within it. Seeing their reflection as opposed to their reality.
The entire film takes place within one evening - with the possible exception of the very beginning and the very end - which take place years later and book-end the film. The evening is the last performance of Prarie. Their last hurrah before the ax-man takes over their old theater and send them on their way. We watch the events unfold during that evening in real time, including on air flubs and unexpected but not overly traumatic tragedies.
The film in tone and style is much like Garrison Keller's delivery of his radio show, soft, raspy, down home comfort. 'Nothing has changed since the 1950's, if I didn't know any better, I'd think I'd gone back in time,' mutters the ax-man watching the show from a special box at the top of the theater. He's shocked such a thing remains in an age of Tivo and Ipod and video-taped reality shows such as American Idol. This is live? He asks. Thinking aloud it should be taped for prosperity, then tucked in a vault.
And Altman comments on the desire to preserve that simpler time, the desire to unwind to Keller's commericial jingles and gospel tunes and jokes. To drift, sleepy-eyed, as the voice echoes in your head and miles pass outside your window, much as my brother and I did. But, by the same token, life moves on. Change happens. While it can be preserved, it can not continue indefinitely. The theater will be torn down and the acts will go on the road, until the angel of death comes a calling.
That said, Prairie does continue on NPR, and may well do so until Keller dies. It only ends in the film - symbolizing perhaps both the ending of a time in the human consciousness and the nostalgic desire to preserve or return to it. A desire that is by no means restricted to one nationality or one segment of the US.
Did I like the film? One does not so much like an Altman film as allow oneself to succumb to its ebb and flow. I found it comforting. Sleepy. Peaceful. Much like a drive across country with my family as a child. The friend I saw the film with, commented afterwards, "you can't grow up in the Midwest without hearing a Prarie Home Companion..." except radio crosses boundaries, and I've heard Keller's rasp in South Carolina and New York, on road trips or just on a lazy drift around the radio dial while in a friend's apartment. The film is no more or less than what it intends to be - being backstage and front while Keller does his last broadcast of his long-running radio show in a world where radio is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. And in a summer of exaggerated violence,explosions, computer animated animals and objects, it is a moment of sleepy-eyed, positive, peaceful rambling, which from my perspective was just what the doctor ordered.