'A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION' From the airwaves to the big screen

The film is a winning translation of the radio show.
By ROGER MOORE
ORLANDO SENTINEL
Radio listeners have been picturing "A Prairie Home Companion" in their minds for more than 30 years. And when we do, a lot of us imagine it in the antique hues of sepia-tone.
The sweetly melancholy weekly show, a throwback to an earlier era in America, is an institution on public radio. It's what nostalgia sounds like, with its blend of old-time music and faux homespun humor.
Robert Altman's film based on the long-running program is what nostalgia looks like. With its dimly lit backstage washed in browns and burgundies, Altman has captured time in a bottle, and radio on the big screen. Altman, whose movies are legendarily messy, over-populated and lively satires of Americana, and Garrison Keillor's crowded, sentimental and witty radio satire of Americana were made for each other.
If the struggle to build a fictional story, with a death metaphor and a depiction of show business -- the way it used to be -- doesn't quite succeed (Keillor wrote the script), it's still a wonderful time capsule. The movie brings us an old-fashioned radio variety show, in all its glory, and an old-fashioned Robert Altman movie, all ensemble-and-improvisation.
If you're a fan of the public radio program, which occupies Saturday nights on the left end of your FM dial, you will connect with this. And if you aren't, you might be tempted to tune in, based on the backstage shenanigans and the delightfully homespun music and comedy that make it on the air from the stage of the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minn.
All-star cast
Keillor plays himself, the avuncular wit who hosts the show. Kevin Kline plays Guy Noir, actually a character Keillor voices on the radio (mimicking old-style radio private-eye dramas). Here, Noir is in charge of security at a radio show that's about to go off the air. It's been sold to Texans (Tommy Lee Jones among them).
And in the faded, amber glow of their last broadcast, Keillor tells everybody backstage a different version of the tale of how he got into radio.
Dusty and Lefty, the singing/joking cowboys of the show, come hilariously to life in the form of Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly.
"Why do they call it PMS? Because Mad Cow was already taken."
The Johnson Sisters, Yolanda and Rhonda, (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin) sing and bicker and reminisce, and try to pass on what they know to Yolanda's daughter (Lindsay Lohan).
"The Carter Family. They were like us. Only famous."
Guy Noir tries to figure out what the strange dame in the white trench coat (Virginia Madsen) is doing as she wanders the wings of the theater.
Keillor sings, passably, and with passion, duets with Streep and actual "regulars" from the program -- Robin and Linda Williams. They all seem to take more pleasure from the singing than from the performing for an audience, which is sort of what the show is about, homemade entertainment the way we used to do it before plasma screen TVs.
A total package
The only thing missing is Keillor's famous monologue, "The News from Lake Woebegon, the little town that time forgot, and the decades could not improve." In scripting a movie with death, nostalgia and jokes -- "She had a Mount Rushmore t-shirt on. Those guys never looked so good." -- he probably figured that a 20-minute mind-trip (which his radio stories are) wouldn't work.
But what does work is the splendid showmanship of the cast -- Harrelson and Reilly, harmonizing as if they've been playing together for years, Streep belting out gospel tunes with Tomlin trying to keep up, Kline vamping up his private eye "in a city that knows how to keep its secrets."
Keillor had to know he was presiding over the audio equivalent of an Altman film every week. Both men traffic in politically edgy Americana and myth-puncturing nostalgia. If their film doesn't belong among Altman's very best, it's at least a lovely and wonderfully representative sample of each man's art, a time capsule of a type of radio show we don't hear anymore, and a type of movie we don't see anymore.