GARRISON KEILLOR’S DECADES-OLD radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion,” is an extremely odd cultural artifact. 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. 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.
Except, of course, that the show is a put-on. “A Prairie Home Companion” is a work of blue-state sophistication that spends two hours furiously winking at its public-radio audience. The ads, for products as various as Powdermilk Biscuits (“Heavens, They’re Tasty and Expeditious”) and the Ketchup Advisory Board (“ketchup: for the good times”), are spurious. The sketches, especially those featuring a hard-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.
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. 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. The Lake Wobegon stories offer an extraordinarily affectionate portrait of churchgoing, God-fearing, farm-country Americans. But the affection is always accompanied by the faintest whiff of condescension–like a pat on the head from a loving but superior relative. 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.
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. Paul between 5 and 7 p.m. 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.
But at this point the movie diverges radically from the reality. 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. 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. In the movie, when Keillor reads commercials for Powdermilk Biscuits and the Ketchup Advisory Board, we are supposed to think those are real commercials. 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).
And while the pickers and strummers 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. 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. 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. They’re all quite amusing in Altman’s patented talk-over-each-other-so-you-can’t-make-out-any-of-the-dialogue style.
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. But then, the Keillor we see in this picture isn’t a bestselling novelist who is also the biggest star in public radio history. He’s a no-talent nobody who doesn’t even deliver an amusing Lake Wobegon monologue.
The narrative conceit here is that we’re seeing the final “Prairie Home Companion” broadcast. The station on which it airs has been purchased by a Texas (boo, hiss) conglomerator who is shutting the show down. Everyone wonders whether Keillor will acknowledge the fact on air.
“I’m not into making big speeches,” he says. “Every show is your last show.”
“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. 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.
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.
John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic and author of Can She Be Stopped?
