Being a Meryl Streep-fan I’ve started collecting dvd-versions of her movies. Last week I stumbled over “A Prairie Home Companion” in a bookstore, and had to take it home. I’d seen parts of this movie in an english class in school, as an example of good old down-to-earth american culture, and I remembered it as a strange but cozy sort of film. That description pretty much nails it.
Keillor, Tomlin, Streep and Lohan on stage.
A Praerie Home Companion is a story about a radio variety show by that same name. The show has been airing live from a small theatre in Minnesota for more than 30 years, featuring live country music, jokes and stories. We get to experience the last airing of the show, as the theatre is about to be closed down. Backstage, the artists and the crew are dealing with the news as best they can, remembering how it all started and thinking about the strange things they’ve experienced along the way.
Suddenly a woman in a white trenchcoat appears in the theatre. Some can see her, some can’t. It turns out that she’s a former listener who was killed in a car crash because she laughed so hard from listening to a joke on the show that she lost control of the car. She has now come to take one of them with her to the afterlife. But as it turns out, she doesn’t stop at one…
When I saw bits of this movie in school, we skipped the parts containing this “angel of death”. This was probably a reason why I liked the film better back then than I did upon watching it a second time. The story of the show itself and the people in it is enough to make this film worth watching, it doesn’t need all this death-mystery stuff, in my opinion. Watching the show’s host (played by Garrison Keillor), the Johnson sisters Rhonda (Lily Tomlin) and Yolanda (Meryl Streep), and Yolanda’s teenaged daugther (Lindsay Lohan), and the singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly) looking back at the years they’ve had together and planning what they’ll do next makes a great story, while the absurdness and mystery put into it all, in my opinion, is a huge drawback.
The ending of the movie will not be described here, but I can say that it’s rather bitter-sweet and seems open to interpretation. It has been described as genius by some film critics, allthough I’d have preferred a more one-way-street happy ending. But that’s just me…
I’d recommend to see this movie on an evening when you’re up for something more than just pure entertainment. This movie offers great music, strange but funny humour, and also a bit of mindwork. And one can always fastforward through the angel parts (which is what I’ll do the next time I see it).
