A Prairie Home Companion
I have no doubt that Robert Altman intends to continue making movies. After all, the 81-year-old master responded with his customary sardonic humor to the indignity of having a stand-by director – the supremely talented Altmanette Paul Thomas Anderson – at the ready in case he keeled over on the set of “A Prairie Home Companion.” But if the movie turns out to be his swan song, it’s a perfect one. “A Prairie Home Companion” is a gently raucous journey into that good night and a celebration of the sustaining power of performance. With the final broadcast of a beloved but hopelessly dated radio show as his pretext, Altman drives home a heartfelt message: If you’ve gotta go, don’t look back and keep the party going. He finds an ally in Garrison Keillor, the modest impresario whose radio show is the basis for the movie. While their aesthetic principles would seem to be at odds, they share a clear-eyed rejection of sentimentality. Playing a version of himself, Keillor wants no acknowledgement whatsoever that the show is his last, and when a cast member dies during the broadcast, he resists all pleas for a tribute. After all, he says, a moment of silence doesn’t work on the radio. And it would just get in the way of his true joy, which is also Altman’s: watching his cast perform. It’s no accident that 20-year-old Lindsay Lohan, unprepared but still beguiling, sings the final number in “A Prairie Home Companion”: Altman is passing the torch. As long as we still have great actors to watch, he seems to say, we’ll be just fine without him.