Movie: A Prairie Home Companion

[will upload the photo when stupid Blogger fixes its server]

Devotees of all things Powdermilk are of course required to see this movie or suffer a heap of Lutheran guilt and more. I went at the midnight hour with a small band of National Public Radio types, and it felt immediately comfortable in precisely the same way as it did when I walked into the auditorium for PHC's 10th anniversary broadcast performed live right here in Anchorage mmfty-mmf years ago.

The thing is, I have no idea why people think Robert Altman is a genius. For my money the only Altmanesque thing worth watching in this movie was a patois delivered by Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as sisters reminiscing on their family's early roots as gospel performers. Beyond that, one could argue that the characteristic Altman approach is already covered in the screenplay by Garrison Keillor, framed as just a larger version of his trademark yarns, with the slow and uninteresting spots and the parts that pierce the heart so unexpectedly, strung together with the knowledge that the fun is always in hearing how GK might find his way out of the mess he's talked himself into and weave an ending to the tale.

It's those small nuggets of gold that were so worth it. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly (as the cowboys Dusty and Lefty) with "The Bad Joke Song" - Lindsay Lohan in an extemp delivery of "Frankie and Johnny" filling in the memory gaps with her own teen-suicide-poem words, tentatively at first, then selling it full out - an unexpected death backstage and the aching of a lover's heart in the chest of a 70-year-old woman. Kevin Kline brings actual depth to Guy Noir, a character I tired of as soon as I heard it on the radio show, and finally can say I enjoyed, once.

A month or so ago, Meryl Streep reprised one of the songs, "Goodbye to My Uncles," on the PHC radio broadcast. You can listen to it here. I have a VocalEssence recording of this song that I just love. It's not a great song, it's just an honest song, and I always weep with the very first words. I liked that I could sit there in the theatre with the tears streaming down my face and hear the sniffles of others around me. And I liked that as the players gather on stage for a rousing finale of "In the Sweet By and By," a small group of voices raised around me in the little cineplex just as it would have in the Fitzgerald on a Saturday night.

Goodbye to my mama, my uncles and aunts,
One after another they went to lie down
In the green pastures, beside the still waters,
And made no sound.
Their arms that have held me for so many years,
Their beautiful voices no longer I hear;
They're in Jesus' arms and He's talking to them
In the rapturous New Jerusalem.
And I know they're at peace in a land of delight
But I miss my mama tonight.