Reflections in a Golden Eye
Robert Altman's “A Prairie Home Companion”
By Kathleen Murphy


Filmmakers as apparently diverse as Howard Hawks, John Ford, Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman always hankered after home. These old masters couldn’t get enough of the illusion of family and settlement, celebrating variations on the theme in movie after movie. Indeed, the very act of making movies projected these artists into sustaining community. Closing down the set, leaving the location, saying goodbye to companions-that was postcoitum triste, a kind of death.

Maybe it’s peculiarly American, this appetite for setting up paradisiacal enclaves of warmth and light and shelter. Left over from the early days, when the vast continent was full of death and danger and otherness, a primal ache for some kind of home sweet home flows through RED RIVER, RIO BRAVO, WAGON MASTER, THE SEARCHERS, THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE, THE WILD BUNCH, MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER, even Altman’s final film, the “only superficially superficial” A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION.

Hawks’ beleaguered folk are always taking cover in some well-lighted place – saloon, jail, hotel – while some species of death sniffs around in the dark outside. Momentarily secure in pools of lamplight, his “families” weave white magic out of coded language and gesture-and especially exorcizing singalongs, from “The Peanut Vendor” song in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS to RIO BRAVO’s “My Rifle, My Pony and Me.”

And who loved frontier outposts more than Ford? In the middle of some picturesque nowhere, wagon-train folk put down boards to dance on, actors take to rickety stages to declaim Hamlet, churches rise, formal military balls and rituals oppose the innumerable graves the West demands in exchange for civilization. When John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, estranged by the War Between the States, soften to the sweet strains of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” it’s a promise that resonates through our history and art.

Outlaw Peckinpah often went South of the Border to find homeground, exiled by moneymen and his own contrariness. His anachronistic wild bunches try their damnedest to hold their down-and-dirty tribes together, but strongest community is usually achieved in gorgeous paroxysms of violence. Still, in THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE, a wry musical about capitalism, Sam created a grizzled, much-sinning Adam (Jason Robards) who puts down roots in the desert and, more or less accidentally, builds a ramshackle oasis for travelers, until a car the color of money runs him down.

Point is, the kind of theater that Hawks, Ford and Peckinpah gloried in was all about shelter and ties that bind, the many arts that keep mortality and soulless commerce at bay. And that’s the beating heart of A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION, Robert Altman’s last of many forays into cinematic community. A melody, a river, a flow of mellow-yellow light, A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION joyously celebrates the way we humans hunker down around the fire, golden sparks flying up into the dark, to tell stories and sing songs, whatever gets us through the night.

So, PRAIRIE is a movie about making art, and about death. In the beginning, we watch night slowly claim the Midwestern sky, the horizon punctuated by water and radio towers. Eddies of radio voices drift and intersect, reporting on market prices, recipes, traffic, baseball scores. In the midst of the lovely minutiae of life, a phrase-"the price to be paid for the way of the flesh"-bobs up, a mild reminder of mortality. But the heavens are illuminated with color-the Northern Lights-and it’s like a drive-in movie projected just for us. That lightshow dissolves into neon reflections, painted all over a rainy street, main thoroughfare linking Mickey’s Diner, the (F. Scott) Fitzgerald Theater and a darkened church.

In McCABE AND MRS. MILLER, the town of Presbyterian Church grew out of a similar triad of shelters: saloon, brothel and church. (PRAIRIE’s Angel of Death claims to be looking for Presbyterian Church.) A sweet-natured con-artist who brings a slovenly camp to communal life, its newly constructed buildings punctuating the wilderness dark with golden lamplight, McCabe ultimately gets frozen out by big-business hatchetmen. His showman’s style and demise by progress link him directly to G.K. (Garrison Keillor), PRAIRIE’s genial emcee. G.K.’s Minnesota radio show, 30 years in the making, counts as thriving community, populated by actors as colorful and idiosyncratic as the denizens of Presbyterian Church.

From the moment we pick up superannuated P.I. Guy Noir (Kevin Kline in excelsis) ambling out of Mickey’s Diner and follow him into the Fitzgerald Theater, home to G.K.’s radio buskers, Altman’s camera seems to glide in the current of a river, so naturally does it flow into dressing rooms, out into hallways, through doors, on and off the stage. The effect of this ongoing motion is to make frame space permeable, giving the actors free rein to invent and re-invent themselves, unconstrained by a determining eye. Even the demarcation between backstage and center stage dissolves: Virginia Madsen’s angel, who’s not visible to all, wanders on and off the stage, and the emotional play among performers simply changes its mode of expression when they’re “on."

Altman’s roving eye embraces the cast, catches them up in stream-of-consciousness filmmaking that emphasizes the sweet, delicate connections keeping this community whole. But something else should be said about the cinematic current that runs through PRAIRIE. There’s something inexorable about it, as though it was also subtly using up the life that it celebrates. Lifestream or bloodstream, however you choose to see it, PRAIRIE’s moving camera carries everything before it, toward death or some other great mystery.

"All the world is a world of rivers flowing to the sea,” someone in the film remarks, and that’s an apt description not only of this elegiac masterpiece, but all of Altman’s films. In his review of PRAIRIE, Roger Ebert hit the mark when he invoked F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final words in “The Great Gatsby": “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."


In PRAIRIE, acting is how we stay alive, how we create the fragile fictions that light up and color our days. Improvisation plus script are hedges against “dead air.” To avoid that dreaded dead air, G.K. won’t call for a moment of silence when one of the cast passes away, but the corpse’s repeated farts are eulogized as “exchanges of gas with the universe.” Lacking shelter from dead air in well-lighted theaters like the Fitzgerald, we’re lost in a dark where “god steps on us like bugs at a picnic."

At one point, G.K. must improvise a commercial, since his stage manager can’t find the appropriate copy. Babbling on hilariously about how one can’t keep things from falling apart, he warns, “All repairs are short term.” Thus, the need to lay in a supply of duct tape. How typically sly of Altman, to turn an ad for duct tape into existential aphorism.

PRAIRIE’s duct tape unreels in annealing memories, anecdotes, jokes, the wonderfully expressive faces of Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly, Garrison Keillor, Kevin Kline, Virginia Madsen, L.Q. Jones. In their dressing room, the Johnson sisters (Streep and Tomlin) deftly weave reminiscences about mother, father, siblings, like fusty Fates keeping love alive. The two actresses play magnificent pitch and catch with oft-told stories from their shared past, reminding me of the two little sisters in THE COLOR PURPLE chanting together while rhythmically clapping each other’s hands. A memory inspires Streep to sing, and the song propels her into her sister’s embrace-and a duet – safe harbor for them both.

The dressing room’s bathed in soft golden light, its CinemaScope mirror adorned with snapshots, clippings, memorabilia. As the sisters “perform” for each other, for us, their reflections emphasize illusion, the way the actresses put on faces for our pleasure and enlightenment.

Streep’s disengaged daughter (Lindsay Lohan) tries to blot out the familiar refrains, to concentrate on her “suicide poetry.” In one of her compositions, she wonders about launching herself into the air – can you depend on God to catch you? For Lola, who doesn’t yet have history, suicide is painless. She doesn’t get that her scarred elders are happily creating support systems, making sustaining art out of family and home, as they do in songs like “Goodbye to My Mama” and “My Minnesota Home.” Not surprising, then, that Lola ends up a worrywart about money, a polished entrepreneur for a religious software company.

You have to recall lovely Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakely) in NASHVILLE, breaking her audience’s hearts with “My Old Idaho Home.” Her pure voice nourishes everyone who hears it, even as the angel in white fades away, drained of energy. The other side of Barbara Jean is the half-crazy, Raggedy Ann comer (Barbara Harris) who closes NASHVILLE with “It Don’t Worry Me,” a different aesthetic approach to life’s tragedies.

(When George Segal crashes bigtime at the end of CALIFORNIA SPLIT’s speedtrip to hit a Reno jackpot, he looks into the camera and comes clean, “It don’t mean a fuckin’ thing.” Shattered, Altman’s player announces he’s heading home. But his partner in gambling as raison d’etre – Elliott Gould – calls it as he sees it: “Oh yeah? Where do you live?")

Lily Tomlin’s professes that “singing is the only thing that puts me right.” And, in PRAIRIE, singing’s a way to cope, to make sense and beauty out of losses. Rivers and lighthouses and friends and farewells and beautiful shores abound in the hymns and folk tunes performed by the ensemble. Like almost everything else in this bittersweet film, music speaks of origins and endings, all the bright fragments we shore up against final dissolution. Home is where the art is.

And don’t write off the healing magic of a litany of dirty jokes, delivered in duet by deadpan cowboys Dusty and Lefty (Harrelson and Reilly). Or shaggy dog spiels about how G.K. got into radio, playing Huck Finn on a raft during Mark Twain Days. Surely these two Midwesterners, the gruff lover of teeming river life and faux-homespun emcee, share a disreputable faith in American con-artistry as a backdoor to truth.

Guy Noir speaks in (Raymond) Chandlerese, bringing a whole world of darkly romantic detective fiction to bear on the evening a femme fatale (Madsen) and the Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones) come to call. Noir’s in charge of theater “security,” though he himself is totally klutzy and uncool, tripping, falling down, generally succumbing to the chaos of the universe, and certainly unable to save the show. (Remember that in film noir, life insurance is generally an ironic ingredient in dark tales about folks fated to die in a world that offers no existential security whatsoever.)

Naturally, Noir’s fascinated by the beautiful blonde in the white trenchcoat who calls herself Asphodel, Angel of Death. She recalls the barefoot girl (Cloris Leachman) in a similar trenchcoat, picked up on a dark highway by P.I. Mike Hammer in KISS ME DEADLY, a late noir about the end of the world. “Remember me,” the doomed dame pleads-and don’t we all hope someone will, once we’re gone? But G. K. refuses to say a word about the white-haired singer (L.Q. Jones) touched by Madsen’s angel: “I’m of an age when if I started to do eulogies, I’d be doing nothing else.” “You don’t want to be remembered?” someone asks. Ripostes G.K.: “I don’t want them to be told to remember me."

During an intermission, Madsen’s lovely femme fatale companionably shares her death with G.K. – how, on the way to meet her lover, she wrecked her car laughing at a penguin joke he told on the radio. It’s a gloriously low-key moment, as the angel explains to the slightly disconcerted comic that his joke really “killed.”

Asphodel will return to that fatal curve with the Axeman, corporate equivalent of Butler’s gunman (Hugh Millais) in McCABE AND MRS. MILLER. Looking down at the show from a glass booth, the stony-faced bastard doesn’t even register a nearby bust of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cheerfully writing PRAIRIE’s obit-"Time’s up ... life moves on"-he eyeballs the performance below and likens it to a “zoo.” Art’s not in his ken or on his spreadsheet: his kind poisons BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA, Sam Peckinpah’s terrible parable about trying to bring home a great film in a world of cold-hearted axmen bent on dismembering it.

Years after the theater’s demolished and the show’s disbanded, Altman’s camera drifts into Mickey’s Diner, gravitating unerringly towards those bright souls it both cherishes and consumes. The Johnson sisters, Guy Noir, G.K., cowboys Dusty and Lefty have all showed up for a reunion, to dream of one last tour. Suddenly, the radiant woman in the white trenchcoat enters and walks toward the little community, toward us and the camera-until the screen whites out. (Can’t help but remember McCabe’s end, swallowed up in a snowdrift, all his moviestar charm erased.)

Death’s whiteout is the antithesis of A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION’s birth, that tour-de-force of impressionist light and chorus of human voices from everywhere, evoking Robert Altman’s cinematic Heartland. We ache for that rich palette, Altman’s colors of community and art.

And like Sam Peckinpah, who could not help but reprise a Mexican Eden at the end of THE WILD BUNCH, Altman gifts us with one final performance-perhaps the director’s own farewell – by his marvelous Prairie Home Companions: “In the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.”

"The death of an old man is not a tragedy,” counsels PRAIRIE’s luminous angel of death. I’ll try to remember that, Mr. Altman.



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