GLENN KENNY'S MOVIE REVIEW (posted 6/5/06)

This is a picture that arrives carrying enough cultural baggage that I feel compelled to state my own prescreening prejudices right up front. I’ve never been an even casual listener of the beloved Garrison Keillor radio show that gives this movie its title and inspiration. Nothing against it; it’s just one of those things I never got into. And while I’ve admired some of Keillor’s writing, his byline’s never set off the “MUST READ IMMEDIATELY” neon sign in my brain the way, for example, Calvin Trillin’s does. (One clue as to why this might be the case is the spine-liquifying headline of a recent Keillor column in Salon, “Love Will Outlast Bush,” which would only have been forgivable had Keillor been comparing the recorded output of Kurt Cobain’s widow with that of Gwen Stefani’s husband. Needless to say, he was not.) Keillor and Prairie Home are one thing; now add American cinema colossus Robert Altman to the mix and you’ve got . . . well, as it happens, you’ve got a loose-limbed, almost cheerily elegiac picture that convincingly creates its own strange and familiar world, a picture that can be thoroughly enjoyed even by those almost totally ignorant of Prairie Home the radio show. And as for this film’s esteemed director, I don’t remember getting such sheer pleasure out of an Altman movie since . . . hmm, lemme look at the filmo . . . hmm—The Player? Not so much . . . O.C. and Stiggs? I wish . . . Um, Popeye? More likely, but . . . Ah—A Wedding. Yeah, that’s it, A Wedding. Whoa. That was, like, almost 30 years ago.

PHC the movie centers around the putative last broadcast of the titular radio show (whaddya know, big business is gonna raze the theater it broadcasts from), which its host—Keillor, playing a version of himself—is treating with a typically midwestern-of-Scandinavian-stock stoicism. The varied eccentric entertainers who provide the show’s music and comedy are somewhat less inclined to go down without a fight or at least a goodbye, and at least one of the show’s singing Johnson sisters (played gorgeously by Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, with Lindsay Lohan eventually holding her own as Streep’s daughter) has a thing or two to say to the fellow everybody on stage calls “G.K.” In the meantime, the show’s anachronistic security guard Guy Noir (Kevin Kline) finds intrigue in the person of a white-overcoated woman (Virginia Madsen), who pays an eventful visit to the dressing room of old-time country singer Chuck Akers (L.Q. Jones). Those are just a few of the characters drawn here, and that these down-home types are drawn so affectionately may suggest to some viewers (especially those who believe Altman’s work displays a greater continuity of conception than I do) that Prairie Home is an almost-apology for Altman’s 1975 Nashville. Maybe, and maybe not. That paranoid, bitter film, a messy olio of contempt and compassion, was a picture very much of its time; PHC is a celebration of a time and place that has never existed, except in the imaginations of its creators and its audience. That Altman, Keillor, and the cast make that imagined time and place so congenial, and so easy for those who aren’t familiar with the radio show to enter, is a compelling testimonial to the continuing artistic vitality of its two main creators. —Glenn Kenny