Feature
By Will Lawrence
 It is fitting that Robert Altman’s last ever film
should reunite him with the medium that first ignited his
voracious passion for dramatics. The 81-year-old director
passed away in November, leaving A Prairie Home Companion — a
movie that captures the fitful exuberance of a live variety
radio show — as the final piece of his masterful legacy.
“My first interest in dramatics was radio,” said
Altman. “I recall listening to the radio a lot as a
kid in the 1930s, like many kids would I’d never miss
it. My hero when I was a young man was Norman Corwin, who
practically created the radio drama. And the first professional
dramatic thing I ever did, outside of a little theatre, was
writing for radio drama, so radio is very dear and near to
me.”
Indeed, the radio show that is the
subject of Altman’s
movie is very near and dear to more than 4 million listeners
on over 550 stations across the US. Called A Prairie Home
Companion, the show is a throwback to the 1930s, a live variety
show that was recorded on stage in the Fitzgerald Theatre
in St Paul, Minnesota, and regularly tours the country today.
It was the brainchild of Garrison Keillor, who launched his
retro broadcast in 1974.
“Garrison Keillor was inspired to start the show after
reporting on the Grand Ole Opry, with its array of country
stars, for the New Yorker,” explained Altman. “My
wife’s a huge fan – she listens to it religiously,
and I listen sometimes. I am a fan. And then, by chance,
my lawyer knows a friend of Garrison’s and, when I
was shooting The Company, he told me that Garrison had an
idea and wanted to make a film, with me directing. I said
I’d be happy to talk to him.”
Keillor himself laughs at the suggestion
that Altman was a bona fide fan — “He was a hostage listener,” he
smiles, “his wife was a fan. But he was the guy I wanted
to direct this film. When you see an all-star cast on a low-budget
picture, that’s thanks to Robert Altman.”
That all-star cast comprises Meryl
Streep, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline,
Lindsay Lohan, Lily Tomlin, Virginia Madsen and John C.
Reilly, all of whom took a minimal salary just to work
with Altman and infuse a project whose subject is so close
to their nation’s heart. It is
a testament to the cast, the director and the show’s
creator — who also drafted the screenplay — that
even those from Middle England will feel a nostalgic twang
for a rapidly fading vision of true Americana.
The show itself is a peculiar blend
of music, storytelling, sketches and spoofs, all recorded
live on stage as a near-theatrical show performed in front
of an audience. It maintains a particular sensibility associated
with the American Midwest, although with listeners all
over the globe, the wry tone is universal. And while the
entertainment is wholesome and homespun, it remains remarkably
witty and sophisticated, all the while projecting an image
of some friendly neighbourhood jamboree. For Altman’s
singular style of filmmaking, so precisely focused on the
minutiae of human lives, it seems perfect fodder.
“The Garrison Keillor piece, while a radio show, is
also very theatrical, which makes it perfect for me,” said
the director. “We shot it like a documentary, I guess
that’s the word that most people are familiar with.
Basically, we’re not trying to disguise the cameras,
there aren’t lots of close-ups; it’s the stuff
that’s caught by camera, rather than things that are
staged. Everyone is miked up all the time and I’m using
always two, sometimes three, cameras.”
Those cameras record the sinews and
tendons that hold the show together, while the movie’s
heartbeat can be felt thudding through each and every performance,
echoing the loudest in the ribcages of two star performers,
Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, who play the singing Johnson
sisters, Yolanda and Rhonda. Their backstage dialogue,
running in one long sequence, is truly dazzling, the two
women gabbing back and forth as they peck at the gossip,
while Altman, cleverly employing their dressing room mirrors,
offers seemingly infinite perspectives.
“On the first day of shooting Bob shot about ten pages
of the script, which is very unusual,” says Streep. “Normally
you’d shoot like a page-and-a-half! And Lily and me
did some very long takes — that scene backstage went
on for 17 minutes. They were long takes, but that’s
what he’s looking for. Bob wants to see everything,
including what’s between – the inadvertent things
are like gold to him.”
Altman himself noted that he secured
Streep’s services
by playing on one of her private passions. “Meryl did
this movie because she got to sing,” he said. “In
her secret mental life she’s a singer. I knew that
I could seduce her by saying that she had to sing in the
movie. That was worth at least $500,000. Singing was the
bait. Actually, all the cast worked for diddlysquat. I on
the other hand filled my coffers!”
Which isn’t exactly true. Although the long takes,
of course, are. “It’s making the actors play
their characters for more than just 35 seconds of their day,” he
said. “I’d rather they played 20 minutes of that
day and let themselves feel the character. Then we’ll
extract what proves the point. I know what I’m looking
for, and I’m editing myself by deciding which monitors
to watch, although half the time I can’t tell you what’s
scripted and what’s improvised!
“With this, I barely read the script — I just
knew I could watch it. I really try not to prepare. I remember
years ago in TV I’d work my finger down each line to
make sure the actor was saying the right thing. But then
I thought ‘What do I care if they say exactly the right
thing?’ So I learned to be quite loose with the kind
of thing, and sometimes it got me in trouble. I got fired
from a lot of TV jobs!”
With his TV apprenticeship served,
Altman, of course, built his career in film, conjuring
such masterpieces as M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs Miller, Nashville, Vincent & Theo,
Short Cuts, The Player, the list seems endless. And every
film, no matter how disparate the subject matter, proved
that for Altman, the beauty of life, its true essence,
would always been found in the details.
These are sentiments shared by Keillor,
and articulated in the lyrics and monologues of A Prairie
Home Companion, the film simply echoing the radio show.
There is one notable difference, however, in that a number
of Keillor’s
fictional characters are brought to life as real people in
the movie. Chief among them is Guy Noir, a PI with a penchant
for Raymond Chandler-style dialogue, played with impeccable
comic timing by Kline, whose narration brackets the film.
The set-up and pay-off to the movie revolve around him — these
are the only two scenes set away from the theatre — playing
out in and around a diner during a pair of episodes that
echo the atmosphere of Edward Hopper’s great painting,
Nighthawks.
That painting, and the scenes in the movie that it informs,
carry the audience to a place in middle America where half-heard
conversations float across the coffee cups, tempting the
listener with snippets of tantalising human thought. It is
the perfect metaphor for Altman, himself a great listener
and recorder of human intricacy, even during the most mundane
moments.
“Basically, this film is the Garrison Keillor show,” Altman
said. “It’s his show and it’s his movie.
He is the conductor and I am just the recorder. My mandate
was to take this verbal material, a radio show, and make
it into something visual.” In doing so, he has created
another cinematic masterpiece. Robert Altman may now be gone,
but films like A Prairie Home Companion will ensure that
he is not forgotten.
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