Word: keillor
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...Everyone acknowledges her talent, but very few can be relied on to turn out for a movie just because she's in it. Her last film, Prime, sank without a trace. At least one of her two new films--A Prairie Home Companion, a gentle comedy based on Garrison Keillor's radio show--will be lucky to draw much of a crowd--and it has Lindsay Lohan...
...Garrison Keillor is the voice of America's shrinking center, a melancholy flatlands existentialist who has masked his often dark materials under a slow-spoken amiability. His Lake Wobegon stories are nearly always about the failure of ideas and ambitions that the plain and simple folks of his fictional home town are too shy, too modest, to openly admit, let alone effectively act upon...
...Prairie Home Companion is an unhappy blend of their essentially antithetical sensibilities, in which a radio show, rather like, but not quite like, the one Keillor has been presiding over since 1974, is giving its last broadcast, having been decreed irrelevant by the new owners of the radio station that has long carried it. This Companion is purely local, not nationally syndicated as Keillor's real show is, and it is basically a songfest. Keillor does not do his monologue about the latest doings in Lake Wobegon. Nor are there the dramatized comic snippets about private eye Guy Noir (played...
...This, of course, is not Keillor's way. His radio show is generally easy listening, but it exists for the moment when he intones, "It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon" and launches into one of his tallish stories, marked by a looping inventiveness and softly colored by a kind of deadpan compassion. I would not for a moment imply that he achieves in them a tragic sense of life, but they are certainly implicitly sympathetic to people whose reach exceeds their emotional grasp and often enough hypnotic in their telling. I'm not saying that a movie...
...Altman just shoots it, without directorial comment or commitment. He's no more than a technician, fearful, it seems, of intruding too heavily on Keillor's territory. But that territory is, in this case, essentially undefended by its founder-proprietor. It is waiting for someone, something, to grant its people felt and wayward lives. If A Prairie Home Companion functions at all it is as a performance film - some of the songs, though not particularly well shot, are at least lively. But that's not enough. Streep's work aside, you can pretty much get all that's worth having...