Robert Altman’s final film, completed and released to theaters just five months before his death, A Prairie Home Companion is generally considered a minor work from the legendary director, often relegated to a trivia note in his career, if not forgotten amidst his more popular and acclaimed successes. That fate is at least a little unfair. While perhaps not one of his masterpieces, A Prairie Home Companion is a delightful little movie and a worthy swan song for Altman to go out with.
In failing health at the time he made it, Altman undoubtedly knew that this would be his last movie. Fearing that he might drop dead on set, the film’s insurance backers insisted that Paul Thomas Anderson, whose own work had been highly influenced by Altman’s, observe the filming and act as a standby ready to step in and complete production in an emergency. Ultimately, that proved unnecessary. Altman was able to finish the shoot himself, and lived long enough to see the movie through to its release on home video later in the year (though just barely).
| Title: | A Prairie Home Companion |
| Year of Release: | 2006 |
| Director: | Robert Altman |
| Watched On: | Blu-ray |
| Also Available On: | Kanopy Tubi Roku Channel Various VOD rental and purchase platforms |
Ostensibly based on the long-running public radio variety show of the same name, A Prairie Home Companion is one of Robert Altman’s most meta movies – which is really saying something for the guy who made The Player. Scripted by the radio show’s creator and host Garrison Keillor, the film tells a fictional backstage story set at a real radio show that was also already a highly fictionalized version of what it presented itself to be – if that makes any sense. Somehow, it actually does make sense when you watch.
Keillor also stars, as himself (or a version of himself), hosting the show during what is supposedly its last episode, after having been bought out by corporate raiders (represented by Tommy Lee Jones as “The Axeman”) eager to shut it down and turn the theater it broadcasts from into a more profitable parking lot. That conceit seems especially weird when you understand that the actual Prairie Home Companion show was still in active production when the movie was released, and continued to make new episodes for another decade.
Aside from Keillor and his impatient producer (Maya Rudolph), few of the performers working for them realize that this particular evening’s live broadcast will be the end of the road for the show, because Keillor has adopted a philosophical attitude toward the whole thing and decided that he doesn’t want to make a fuss about it. As far as he’s concerned, it’s just another episode and everything should proceed exactly as usual. If there aren’t any more after this, so it goes.
That’s more-or-less all the plot or story in the movie. Like many of Altman’s films (especially the best ones), A Prairie Home Companion is an ensemble piece with a huge cast of celebrity stars – chief among them Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as a folksy country act called The Johnson Girls, Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly as a pair of singing cowboys who also do a comedy routine, and Lindsay Lohan as Streep’s angsty daughter. Kevin Kline plays Guy Noir – one of the popular recurring bits in the real radio show – a private investigator working as a security consultant for the theater, who acts like he stepped directly out of a 1940s detective movie. Virginia Masdsen also appears as a mysterious stranger in a white coat who may possibly be an angel; she drifts through the stage observing the other characters, most of whom acknowledge her existence only when she chooses to interact with them.
If this sounds like a jarring mix of unrelated story ideas, Altman makes it work in that particularly messy and rambling, but charming and amiable way he’d perfected over the years. His cameras weave through the sets, from front stage to back, dropping in on characters telling long-winded stories they’ve told a thousand times before and singing songs they’ve sung a thousand times as well. All of them are colorful and engaging, even when they’re not doing much of anything, except being who they are.
The country music milieu, and the casting of Lily Tomlin, of course bear some resonance with Altman’s Nashville. For the most part, A Prairie Home Companion is a less ambitious movie than that one. The thread of story connecting everything together feels slight (if intentionally so). Nevertheless, the film is rich with themes of endings and death, finality, and closing the book on a life well-lived. How many artists, at age eighty, get the opportunity to make one last statement piece like that, and actually manage to pull it off with such agreeable results?
A Prairie Home Companion played only in limited theatrical release in 2006, where it made a very modest profit off its low budget. It received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics and was mostly forgotten at awards time. It never exactly burned up the home video sales charts, either. When the original Prairie Home Companion drew to its actual close ten years later, it did so amid some scandal involving sexual misconduct allegations against Garrison Keillor that unfortunately tainted the legacy of both his show and the movie spinoff. How much (or whether at all) that should affect one’s enjoyment of Robert Altman’s last film is a question viewers will have to decide for themselves.
The Blu-ray
A Prairie Home Companion was released on DVD back in late 2006, but only made its belated Blu-ray debut in October of 2024, courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection. No technical notes have been provided regarding the source of the video transfer. It doesn’t look great, but I suppose some (or possibly all) of its faults may be inherent to the way the movie was made.
During production in 2006, Robert Altman shot A Prairie Home Companion on HDCAM video at 1080p resolution. It was only his second all-digital feature, after 2003’s The Company. Digital cameras at that time were not quite up to the quality of later models. I assume that all post-production work was also completed digitally at the same resolution and then printed out to film stock for distribution to theaters. I have no information about whether the Blu-ray was mastered from the original Digital Intermediate, or from a scan of the film-out. (If the latter, how long ago was that scan created?)
The 2.35:1 image (not 2.39:1, as claimed on the back of the case art) is relatively sharp, but not exceptionally so. Both contrast and colors have a flat, dull appearance. Most problematic, all on-screen credit text, as well as certain other moments with a lot of fine object detail (look specifically at the studio microphones on stage during wide shots) exhibit distracting amounts of shimmer and aliasing artifacts. The issue is difficult to capture in a screenshot viewed on a standard computer monitor, but the jaggies along curves and diagonal lines in the text are very evident on a large screen.
The disc is watchable enough overall. I’m not sure whether attempting to remaster it would make any difference or not. In general, I think it would probably look better if Altman had shot this one on film with a traditional post-production workflow, but that sadly wasn’t the case.
The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack is likewise serviceable, without calling too much attention to itself one way or another. Altman was of course famous for filming large group scenes with overlapping dialogue from multiple characters talking at the same time. The actors were recorded either from wireless microphones hidden in their wardrobe, or from the visible microphones on stage during the performance scenes. The soundtrack is almost entirely dialogue and on-camera singing. Fidelity is adequate, but has no depth or dynamic range of note. Surround use is also extremely subtle.
Bonus features on the Blu-ray include a vintage audio commentary by Robert Altman and star Kevin Kline, 35 minutes of music performances from the original Prairie Home Companion live show, an old 49-minute making-of documentary about the film, a 36-minute “Soundtrack Preview” supercut of just the movie’s music performances (in Standard Definition resolution), and a trailer. An additional menu option provides a chapter guide with direct access to the songs in the movie so you can watch them in HD, making the Soundtrack Preview thing irrelevant.
Related
- Tommy Lee Jones
- Lindsay Lohan
- Virginia Madsen
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