 |
| Garrison Keillor in A Prairie Home Companion |
Cast: Woody Harrelson, L.Q. Jones, Tommy Lee Jones, Garrison Keillor, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Maya Rudolph, Tim Russell, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin. Screenplay: Garrison Keillor, Ken LaZebnik. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Dina Goldman. Film editing: Jacob Craycroft. Music: Garrison Keillor.
Garrison Keillor used to be celebrated as a humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain and James Thurber, crafting stories out of the regional American experience with his best-selling tales of Lake Wobegon, Minn. and hosting a public radio show with a devoted following. His descent into obscurity came, like many others, with charges of inappropriate sexual behavior, but it's a mark of how famous he once was that a feature film with a starry cast was built around his radio show. A Prairie Home Companion was Robert Altman's last feature, and it demonstrates his ability to direct an ensemble of vivid characters. The thread of story concerns the final broadcast of the show, brought about by the purchase of the theater by a large Texas corporation. Somehow, a mysterious figure in a white trench coat, played by Virginia Madsen and billed in the credits as "Dangerous Woman," is inserted into the plot, as is the character of Guy Noir, the private eye played on the radio by Keillor but in the film by Kevin Kline. But the point of the movie is really to have the stars show off. Keillor's owlish presence is what holds the movie together, and the cast seems to be having fun. Whether the audience does too seems to be a matter of taste. I admit that I never appreciated Keillor's humor. It always seemed to contain a whiff of condescension to the residents of Lake Wobegon and the old-fashioned down-home music on his show, a kind of smirky folksiness, and that mars the film for me.
