It’s rare to come across a film like this — one that has so much going on in every scene, yet manages to keep its audience perfectly at ease. Of course, Robert Altman is a rare talent, and as we’ve come to expect from this legendary director much of the beauty in “A Prairie Home Companion” lies in the details. Pay attention while Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin — magnificent together as folksy Midwestern singing sisters in the twilight of their careers — effortlessly toss rhetorical bullion back and forth and you may notice the date 4-5-94 scrawled in pen on the jeans worn by Streep’s forlorn teenaged daughter (a low-key Lindsay Lohan). April 5, 1994, was the day Kurt Cobain killed himself. Who would think to add a little touch like that besides Altman?
“A Prairie Home Companion” plays out in a musty old theater in St. Paul, Minn. over the course of the final live performance of a fictitious radio variety show much like the actual — and still-surviving — radio program hosted by Garrison Keillor, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ken LaZebnik and stars as the hangdog host. The show features a hilarious singing cowboy act (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly) the aforementioned Johnson Sisters and, of course, Keillor wielding his considerable down-home charm and deadpan wit. The cast of characters behind the scenes is mighty impressive and includes Kevin Kline as security guard, Guy Noir, who is two parts Clousseau, one part Raymond Chandler. Virginia Madsen shines — literally — as an angel who comes to escort at least one of the film’s principals to Heaven. Tommy Lee Jones is the cold-blooded corporate axeman come to level the old theater and turn it into a parking lot. He’s from Texas, of course, because Altman and Keillor wouldn’t have it any other way.
