It’s strange the way that reading about authorial intent colors a reading of a text - would I have, as many have, reveled in A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION as a joyful and exuberant celebration, Altman’s most purely enjoyable work in years, had I not read Nick Pinkerton’s insightful interview with Altman on the subject of the film? Altman, in that interview, has few pretentions to the film’s putatively empathetic tone:

More empathetic than what? It’s all about death, you know? I don’t think I’ve ever done a film that has more to do with death as does Prairie, and if that’s empathetic…

Last night, seeing the film for the first time, I was struck not by the joyful moments - though there are some of those, among the best moments I’ve had in a theatre this year - but by the harrowing darkness of the piece, the haunting images of Tommy Lee Jones’ Axeman alone in his booth, by the scene in which a seemingly minor character dies alone, the chiaroscuro lighting and heartbroken monologues on times past. It’s a devastatingly sad little movie, with off-rhythm tears, and a trio of bizarrely stylized performances that might give insight into the film’s meaning. Yes, there’s humor, but the humor often derives from the way the dolorous sidelong glances of its beverie of talented actors contrasts with the winsome platitudes coming out of their mouths (or, in the case of Lindsay Lohan’s depressive teenager, the way her hilariously awful suicide poetry sounds so gentle, her eyes lighting up with every inane cliche).

Summarizing an Altman film is a fool’s errand, but I’ll attempt: the film is a depiction of the on-stage and back-stage goings-on at the final performance of an old-timey local radio show not unlike Garrison Keillor’s nationally-broadcast NPR staple A Prairie Home Companion. The station, recently bought out by a ClearChannel-like conglomerate (the film notes that the company hails from Texas and is governed by religious conservatives), is shutting down. Meanwhile, a literal Angel of Death (Virginia Madsen) shows up to the theatre to make a claim.

The film has all the formal markings of an Altman film - long takes, roving fly-on-the-wall zooms and pans, naturalistic performance and improvised dialogue, and bizarrely aestheticized moments that intrude on the otherwise realistic diegesis. But there’s a deeper quality here than to much of his recent work - if the film isn’t empathetic necessarily, its blend of sweetness and sadness conjures an almost Japanese emotional sensibility, the same sort of mono no aware people have identified in the works of Ozu.

Thinking back today, the standout moments are almost entirely the on-stage performances: Lohan winningly shuffling through “Frankie and Johnny” (a song that should be instantly recognizable to those of you who, like me, love the animation of UPA), Keillor and Streep beautifully harmonizing on “Gold Watch and Chain”, and Reilly and Harrelson laughing their way through “Bad Jokes,” maybe the film’s best sequence.

Less successful are the off-stage sequences involving Jones, Kevin Kline, and Virginia Madsen. The trio, who putatively represent whatever claims to narrative thrust (a complete afterthought in this film, but who cares anyway?) the film possesses, are difficult to grasp either as characters or as representational elements. Altman is clearly the least in his element in the scenes with these three actors, whose characters’ own slavish representation of specific narrative types minimize their own ability for improvisatory freedom. The camera flows less freely here, and the scenes’ comedic elements sometimes fall painfully flat. Kline in particular seems uncomfortable in his role as Guy Noir, a bumbling Sam Spade-like security guard borrowed from the radio program. Madsen’s overenunciative performativity stands as sharp contrast to the naturalism of the film’s other performances. Altman here seems to be positing the bald performativity of death as in contrast to the ‘life’ of naturalism, a perhaps too-simple binary that nonetheless serves as an effective mission statement for much of Altman’s career.

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