A Prairie Home Companion

Robert Altman is an American master at putting together an ensemble movie and A Prairie Home Companion is his latest venture in that genre.

The movie follows the fictional last performance of Garrison Keillor’s long-running radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. In between the performances, the audience also gets to experience what happens backstage during the show. This movie is my first taste of this celebrated radio show and it really strikes me more as a concert film than anything else. Keillor is famous for his storytelling and Midwest sense of humor, but this movie does not dwell too much on his observations about life and acts mainly as a showcase for American folk music.

Laurence Olivier once said there are “no small roles, only small actors.” Altman’s movies are proof of that. Because of his reputation, he always attracts talented actors to appear in his ensemble movies. The stars in this movie all give very naturalistic performance. Actually nobody is really a movie actor in this film. Like their roles in the movie, they have all become stage performers and entertainers. And entertain is what they did. Everyone did his/her own singing in the movie and they succeeded in showing the audience another side of them that we have rarely seen.

I saw this movie right after watching The Lost City. Music is a major theme in both movies. In The Lost City, music and other cultural movements are under censorship because of ideological control. In A Prairie Home Companion, American folk music has also become a thing of the past because of profit-driven corporate culture. It is a shame that many young generations are not exposed to this simplistic but expressive music.

A Prairie Home Companion may be slow-paced and may lack a dramatic story line, but it takes us to a bygone era and makes us appreciate an old medium that has been too long in the shadow of TV.