Review: Altman's gentle, graceful movie preoccupied with death

Director Robert Altman is 81 and the beneficiary of a heart transplant, but he has no plans to slow down: He’s currently preparing three movies.

This may surprise those who see “A Prairie Home Companion,” a gentle, graceful movie so preoccupied with death and the end of things that it seems like the work of a man politely preparing his own funeral service — corny jokes included — to save his loved ones the trouble.

“Adieu, adieu, kind friends, adieu,” harmonizes one vocal group in the film, while another (consisting of Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin) sings of “the green pastures beside the still waters.” And, “Gather ye rosebuds while you may,” quotes bungling private eye Guy Noir (Kevin Kline). “Extinct Forever” reads a T-shirt worn by young Lola (Lindsay Lohan). “Checks Cashed” says a neon sign. “In the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore,” croons the ensemble, during the end credits. Even the dim lighting of this backstage drama seems planned to suggest the failing eyesight of those slipping into darkness.

All the while, an angel (Virginia Madsen) in a trench coat wanders about. “The death of an old man is not a tragedy,” she says. Altman fans may sympathize more with the sentiments of a makeup woman, who comments: “It’s the end of an era when this show goes.”

And yet, the movie itself states that mourning is a waste of time in lives as short as ours. “I’m at an age where if I started to do them, I’d do nothing but eulogies,” says the movie’s star, radio personality Garrison Keillor. “We pay attention (to the deaths of colleagues) by doing our job.”

Written by Keillor (who plays himself, more or less), “A Prairie Home Companion” is a fictionalized behind-the-scenes look at what is supposed to be the final broadcast of a famous radio program being shut down by a consortium of corporate Texas Christians who plan to destroy the show’s home base, the historic Fitzgerald Theater in downtown St. Paul. But I couldn’t get worked up over the avarice of the corporate “ax man” (Tommy Lee Jones) who comes to pull the plug on the “live radio variety show, the kind that died 50 years ago, but somebody forgot to tell them.”

In reality, Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” has been on the air for 31 years, attracting a large and loyal following with a Yankee liberal humanist/Grand Ole Opry mix of homespun humor, shaggy-dog stories, traditional music and comic commercials (the movie includes endorsements for rhubarb pie and powdermilk biscuits).

What we see onscreen, however, looks like it should have been put out to pasture long ago. Keillor is more sluggish than charming, and the actors — including Streep and Tomlin as “the Johnson Sisters” and Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly as singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty — look like they’re having a lot of fun together, but not necessarily when the cameras are rolling. Moviegoers might sympathize with Lohan’s impatient teenager, who is eager to get away from these old people and their slooooow stories.

Like Altman’s similar ballet movie, “The Company,” “A Prairie Home Companion” is more interesting as an exhibit in the director’s 50-year career than as an independent work. It’s clear that Altman found Keillor to be a kindred spirit: Both men are responsible for large ensembles of actors and crew members who aid them in the creation of highly collaborative yet distinctively personal entertainments. But this artistic sympathy can’t overcome a script that is sometimes more somnambulistic than meandering.

Even so, the movie has its rewards. As usual, Altman’s restless but never intrusive camera — which alternately pushes into space and pulls back toward the viewer, linking character to character, scene to scene and movie to moviegoer — suggests the interconnectivity of existence with much more economy than the narrative contrivances of a movie like “Crash.” And although I frankly found much of the movie dull, the gradual accumulation of Altmanesque detail builds to a final scene that is surprisingly powerful as it confronts the characters — and us — with the inevitable.

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Rated PG-13 for risque humor

2-1/2 out of 4 stars