Altman's Art

A Prairie Home Companion

Directed by Robert Altman

Maybe now that Robert Altman has made his The Golden Coach with A Prairie Home Companion, his detractors can finally admit how well his career has matched that of Jean Renoir. For the uninitiated, that's intended as high compliment: Renoir being the standard of European art-movie humanism and deceptive formal complexity; Altman being just as formally innovative and spiritually perceptive. In Prairie, Altman observes the final production of Garrison Keillor's Minneapolis-based radio show but deconstructs the contrived, homespun naivete of the program to reveal how showbiz works, how people interact, how life and art mix. That was the same strategy of Renoir's 1959 The Golden Coach-a play-within-a-play movie that spun viewers through several levels of artifice, perception and feeling; the result was sui generis and exhilarating. French New Wave romantic Francois Truffaut named his production company after that film, and Altman, like the New Wave's Jacques Rivette, has repeatedly taken inspiration from it.

Why should 2006 moviegoers care? Because Renoir's format allows Altman to summarize the condition of our contemporary culture. That is, Altman's seasoned perspective results in a completely original work of art. Prairie steps back from the repugnant hurly-burly of television, tabloids and the corporate contrivance that has turned most pop music into American Idleness. This simpler view, in which radio performers enact tall-tales, vent grievances and sing local folk tunes, reflects the spiritual yearning that mainstream pop persistently ignores and that even the specialized worlds of indie cinema have, with equal mendacity, distorted into fashionable cynicism.

For contrast, Altman offers Keillor's own cast-of-characters but here they are embodied by movie stars: Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep play Rhonda and Yolanda Johnson, the surviving siblings of an old-time family singing act; Lindsay Lohan is Yolanda's goth-minded daughter Lola, who rejects country music for brooding; Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly as Dusty and Lefty are a mirror-image brother act specializing in ribald folksongs and cornball repartee. Kevin Kline portrays Guy Noir, a detective who slips between the different groups, sidling by another spooky observer (Virginia Madsen, wearing what Dennis Delrogh identified as a Brewster McCloud trench coat).

They orbit around Keillor, the radio show's star who is something like the benign Stage Manager in Thorton Wilder's Our Town. As these actors busily create Altman's illusion, videographer Ed Lachman brings them theatrically close enough to wink at us. (His levitating camera illustrates the short leap from life to art.) But, more amazingly, in working to capture moments of life, the performers reveal their individuality and eccentricity. The avant-garde miracle of Prairie honors Renoir's bequest: that complexity, warmth and seeming spontaneity make the highest, truest form of cinema.

Altman's elegant, dreamlike pace goes against the pop-mania that coarsens film culture even when it's not summer. Recreating Keillor's nostalgic world let's Altman spy on family, community and business collectives. The authenticity of his approach is felt in the free-floating metaphors and symbols (including F. Scott Fitzgerald as an icon of Midwestern anxiety) which give historical significance to what would otherwise be mundane. All the comings and goings and contrapuntal dialogues convey Altman's sensitivity to the loneliness that exists even in fractious, chaotic environments. Individuals are always at odds with their surrounding groups; it's the idiosyncrasy we all possess and secretly understand that pushes Prairie past nostalgia. It is a grave and funny consideration of human existence.

It's also a one-movie Altman film festival. Everything here has been seen before-in Countdown, Brewster McCloud, Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, The Company, Health, Popeye, etc.-but the tone is different. It is metaphysical and elegiac. Some musical numbers match what Jonathan Demme achieved in Neil Young: Heart of Gold; the songs comment on the "drama" while the performers' faces and composure show life's lessons. Every Tomlin-Streep scene is a duet; their whirling medleys of regrets and ambitions become the film's high points but are consistent with its sharp details and noble rhythm. Don't make the mistake of calling Prairie Altman's swan-song; like The Golden Coach, it is a preview of everyone's.