A Prairie Home Companion: The Movie

Whilst in Alexandria, Virginia, we took a little time out to see A Prairie Home Companion: The Movie. As a listener of the excellent radio show of the same name, I had high hopes. Well, okay, I sort of didn’t because Garrison Keillor is an odd looking man, and I seriously wondered how he would make the transition to the big screen. On that count, Mr. Keillor made the transition wonderfully. Unfortunately he seemed to have left his stories and his wit back on the radio.

If you had watched the film and had never listened to the radio show, you would have three misconceptions:

1. the radio show is a music show entirely
2. the radio show is a Christian show
3. the radio show has shut down and is off the air

None of these are true of course. The radio show has a lot of skits and dramatic pieces. It is also very funny. The humor and wit hardly appeared at all in the movie. The movie made a big thing about having a Christian singing troupe and praising the Lord in song and speech. This is nothing like the radio show. Keillor does make jokes about his familiar Norwegian Lutherans and of course the Unitarian Universalists, but he never hits you over the head with it. And finally, the show is still running, unlike the radio show in the movie, which was dismantled in the end.

I got Mr. Keillor’s point that corporate forces are taking over radio (and other areas) and shutting down well loved shows that don’t figure into the profit motive. It was a good point to make. But I found myself repulsed by the movie. First off, it was all music. Non-stop. There were snippets of dialogue in between the music numbers, but it was like watching a concert video. Because the movie was all music all the time, there was little or no story.

The thing that got me though was that I found some of the humor in the movie retrograde. I expect Keillor’s humor to be witty and funny, but the various jokes about women being “cows” had neither wit nor humor. We just shook our heads at those—the “G.K.” of the movie seemed a sexist jerk. Sure, Mr. Keillor makes jokes about men and women from time to time, but they usually have some redeeming quality or are inherently funny. The jokes in the movie were mean-spirited.

And of course Mr. Keillor’s finest talent, telling stories, made no appearance in the movie whatsoever.

The final scene with Lindsay Lohan as a busy, corporate type coming into the diner was one of the most poorly acted scenes in any movie I’ve seen for a while. That scene was horrible and an awful way to end the film.

So I still love A Prairie Home Companion: The Radio Show, but the movie was a total bust in my opinion.