A Prairie Home Companion
November 2006 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

How do you make a film of a live, long-running radio variety show that has no plot and is divvied into segments? The answer here is genius: pretend it is the final show and then just film the show; shoot the onscreen action but cut to backstage; and most important, let us get to know the characters because this movie is all about the most likable group of people to hit the screen.

It seems fitting that Robert Altman would direct a movie about humorist Garrison Keillor. The two work in similar ways. Keillor’s radio show has some structure -- there are faux commercials, favorite drama spots, and music numbers -- but improvisation seems the rule. Altman captures Keillor pacing the stage and rewriting, while others are performing. Altman himself is a movie director who has complete confidence in his actors, letting them largely improvise and happily accepting their ideas about the characters they are playing. Here the result is that you feel the camera has caught a moment, rather than set one up, in the final show of Prairie Home Companion. The movie seems not "acted" but "realized."

Altman presents Keillor’s show much as it is on the radio. The band is the same house group of instrumentalists used on the air with piano player Richard Dworsky as its leader. Two members of the radio cast are here in technical roles. Keillor’s dry deadpan Americana humor is ever present. But beyond that, there are changes. For example, Guy Noir, a fictional detective in a weekly sketch on the show, has become a live security person played by Kevin Kline. There is no Lake Woebegone monologue, which I regretted at first then realized would have left moviegoers new to the show scratching their heads. There is less interactive communication with the audience than the radio show has. The movie is not, then, a carbon copy of the radio show. What it does is to capture perfectly the down-home Americana goodness of the original.

What Altman adds to the show are characters portrayed by big-name actors. Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin play the Johnson girls, who used to be part of a four-sister act. They do their own singing, as does everyone else, and they are, in a word, fantastic. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly portray Dusty and Lefty, two cowboy singers who seem always to be in character as "characters." The bad guy is Tommy Lee Jones, head of the corporation that is to bulldoze the theater and thus cancel the show. Virginia Madsen is cast as the "Dangerous Woman," an intense, elegant, mysterious lady in a long white coat who might be an angel in disguise. I really could have done without this subplot, but as it is, it’s well done.

The DVD is delightful in every aspect. The widescreen picture has good definition and rich color. The sound, though only Dolby Digital 5.1, is remarkable. All the instruments, guitars, piano, fiddles, and bass, sound natural and have superb presence. Surround sound is used sparingly but is very effective. As the camera switches from a music act onstage to some kind of action backstage, the sound of the musicians shifts from full upfront to distant surround.

The extras all add to the enjoyment of this amiable movie. There is a friendly, informative commentary with Altman and Kline that is one of the best of its sort that I have heard. It provides considerable insight into Altman’s working method and explains why actors love him so much. The musical numbers and commercials that have been cut up in the movie are presented in their totality, and there’s a comprehensive documentary that defines the radio program and shows how it was made into a movie. Like the movie, the extras are comfortable and so deceptively simple that you don’t realize the genius at work until you finish them. This is a DVD that will give you many hours of pure joy.

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