Tampa Film Fan

opinion:a prairie home companion

Fellow film fan Jim MacEachern has generously shared his review of A Prairie Home Companion with us:

I did see A Prairie Home Companion and loved it. I think it’s Altman’s The Reivers for the Faulkner comparison. At 81 he’s in fine form. The ghostly Virginia Madsen as an apparition that wanders through the film is a bit heavy handed but Mr. Altman has never been subtle. Keillor wrote the script so he is at least partly to blame for that. But he has to be given credit as well for the creation of this wonderful, droll commentary on old time radio and Midwestern values. Altman was born in Kansas City and shares those roots but looks at them with a more jaundiced eye. It’s an eye for human behavior filtered through 50 years of a marijuana-induced LA haze that sees everyone as characters in the movie of life. His characters are tragic and funny and they know this about themselves. The lucky ones know the role they are playing and the sad ones don’t have a role to play yet and that can eat at you.It opens and closes at a Roadside Diner that looks like a Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. Altman and Keillor know that this innocent Americana is a lie but they have great affection for those who know this but yearn for that myth anyway. The actors are incredible. The teaming of Meryl Streep and Lilly Tomlin as the surviving members of a family of singers specializing in gospel and old-time inspirational songs is wondrous. It’s been a rough life for them in many ways but they go on. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly as Dusty and Lefty, a cowboy singing and comedy team, seem like they have been working together all their lives. The joy of performing even brings the juvenile/ suicidal Lindsay Lohan to life.There is nothing terribly profound in Prairie but Keillor’s script and Altman’s searching eye give us insight into a world gone by and the people who inhabited it. The movie is too short!