'Home' on the Range
PODHORETZ, JOHN
'Home' on the Range A film reinvention of a radio institution. BY JOHN PODHORETZ Garrison Keillor's decades-old radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion," is an extremely odd cultural artifact. It...
...And while the pickers and strum-mers on the real radio show are actually the nation's finest and most talented purveyors of so-called roots music, in the movie they are just third-rate locals who have been warbling for the natives forever...
...I have to confess that I love the show, but then, it was tailor-made for blue-state city boys unable even to take out the garbage without first having an ironic exchange with the wife...
...Guy Noir, the detective voiced by Keillor on the show, is a character in the movie, appearing alongside Keillor as the theater's security guard (and played by Kevin Kline in a lame slapstick turn that represents this brilliant actor's absolute lowest moment on screen...
...Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin ham it up in Minnesota accents as the Johnson Sisters, gospel artists who sit backstage telling shaggy-dog stories about the old days when they drew audiences at county and state fairs...
...Every show is your last show...
...The sketches, especially those featuring a hardJohn Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD's movie critic and author of Can She Be Stopped...
...Death is indeed inevitable, but movies that strain to inform us of the fact do very little but steal two precious hours of life from us that we'll never get back...
...The narrative conceit here is that we're seeing the final "Prairie Home Companion" broadcast...
...It is a loving parody of something already long defunct when Keillor started his show 32 years ago in Minneapolis—a local rural variety program broadcast on the AM band...
...No, the show we see in the movie is the very thing "A Prairie Home Companion" sends up—an AM local variety program of a kind that hasn't actually existed for ages...
...boiled detective named Guy Noir, who is forced to express his feelings in our emotive era, gently poke fun at left-liberal ideology without poking any holes in it...
...The radio show we see in the movie is not the blue-state condescension fest that warms the cockles of every blue-stater's sentimental heart...
...But the affection is always accompanied by the faintest whiff of condescension—like a pat on the head from a loving but superior relative...
...The ads, for products as various as Powder-milk Biscuits ("Heavens, They're Tasty and Expeditious") and the Ketchup Advisory Board ("ketchup: for the good times"), are spurious...
...But then, the Keillor we see in this picture isn't a bestselling novelist who is also the biggest star in public radio history...
...But at this point the movie diverges radically from the reality...
...Keillor's plummy basso voice wraps around his listeners like a blanket as he offers weekly tales of comic suffering and cosmic redemption, all of them (to hear him tell it) improvised...
...Paul between 5 and 7 P!M...
...Keillor and the octogenarian bad boy of American cinema, Robert Altman, have now collaborated on a film entitled A Prairie Home Companion...
...Like the radio show itself, it takes place on a Saturday night at the Fitzgerald Theater in St...
...John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson appear as a cowboy-singing duo, a trash-talking twosome whose unwholesome antics have gotten them kicked off the air more than once...
...I'm not into making big speeches," he says...
...In the movie, when Keillor reads commercials for Powder-milk Biscuits and the Ketchup Advisory Board, we are supposed to think those are real commercials...
...The Lake Wobegon stories offer an extraordinarily affectionate portrait of churchgoing, God-fearing, farm-country Americans...
...In reality, Keillor would never permit such mediocre musicians on his program, which is a showcase for the most distinguished folk artists in the country...
...Everyone wonders whether Keillor will acknowledge the fact on air...
...Thank you, Plato," Meryl Streep, always great and even greater here than usual, says in response...
...It's hard to know what to make of this change in the show's status from beloved Bobo broadcast to ragged radio remnant until, about a half-hour through the proceedings, Virginia Madsen appears backstage wandering around like a zombie...
...He's a no-talent nobody who doesn't even deliver an amusing Lake Wobegon monologue...
...It's a compendium of folk, country, and bluegrass music, comedy sketches and storytelling as square and American as a Norman Rockwell painting or a Whitman sampler...
...And the movie's subject is a radio program called "A Prairie Home Companion" hosted by Garrison Keillor that features lots of bluegrass, gospel, and country music...
...Except, of course, that the show is a put-on...
...And then there is the climax of the show, Keillor's own remarkable 20-minute monologue about his "home town out there on the prairie," Lake Wobegon—a place of the heart that, in three decades, has become as elaborately detailed and generationally populated as Thomas Hardy's Wessex...
...After awhile she tells Keillor she is the Angel of Death, and when he takes this fact in stride, as though she's telling him she's an Amway representative, an already bizarre film becomes an embarrassment...
...What we're watching, it turns out, isn't a comedy about radio, but an act of joint solipsism on the part of Keillor and Altman—a profoundly uninteresting and unmoving meditation on the inevitability of death...
...A Prairie Home Companion" is a work of blue-state sophistication that spends two hours furiously winking at its public-radio audience...
...The station on which it airs has been purchased by a Texas (boo, hiss) conglomerator who is shutting the show down...
...They're all quite amusing in Altman's patented talk-over-each-other-so-you-can't-make-out-any-of-the-dialogue style...
Vol. 11 • June 2006 • No. 37
