A Prairie Home Companion: A Hit for Garrison Keillor, Robert Altman and Company

A Very Companionable Companion

Reality meets fiction as four threads repeatedly intersect, pass by, diverge, come back together and intersect again in Robert Altman's and Garrison Keillor's newest hit from the Midwest, A Prairie Home Companion, named lovingly after the radio show it immortalizes and in some measure documents. 

If you are one of those who have never tuned in, accidentally or intentionally (I, myself, have caught it by accident a handful of times), to National Public Radio's broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion," you may have less chance of understanding the subtle humor and shades of meaning underlying the more apparent story, plot devises and jokes. But even someone wholly unfamiliar with Garrison Keillor's abundantly popular radio show is easily engrossed and caught up with events and characters as the plot lines twine around each other like a double helix in bloom. 

The movie opens with the backstage bustle of a live-audience show approaching "curtain up," and some of the talent is missing. But not to fear, the missing ones come strolling in amidst cheerful hello's to all and recognition of tunes played on the piano. This is how Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin and Lindsey Lohan make their entrances, and a grand way it is to enter, too. Perfectly staged, perfectly written, perfectly filmed; this is a stars' entrance. Meryl Streep here delivers the first line that lets us into the internal situation of these people we will now get to know. The line concerns a song sung by the Carter Family, "You know, like us...only famous...." 

The film is set up by alternately spending time in three theater locations. First, the camera sits in the ladies dressing room with Yolanda (Streep) and Rhonda (Tomlin), sisters, as they reminisce, grouse and cry a little about times and loves past on this, the night after which the radio show will go to join other things of times past. Lola (Lohan), Yolanda's daughter - named after the sisters' mother Lola - writes poetry, listens to the stories and decides how to react to maybe getting her chance to sing for the show.