Review: A Prairie Home Companion

by ComputerBob

January 8, 2007

Last night, my wife and I watched A Prairie Home Companion. I don't care what the awards or reviews say — it was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. What I had expected to be a light and funny, credible, behind-the-scenes look at the popular radio show, turned out to be a mercilessly droning, unforgivably dark and dreary, completely joyless clock-stopper, with amateur-hour acting, way too much really bad singing, absolutely no memorably funny moments, and very little credibility. Garrison Keillor, Kevin Kline, Tommy Lee Jones, and Maya Rudolph could all have been replaced by mannequins, and it quickly became incredibly annoying to watch Virginia Madsen's similarly emotionless character silently and pointlessly creep through nearly every scene — not to mention the fact that her character's existence is proof of the writers' biblical ignorance. Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin play sisters who've supposedly been singing together professionally all of their lives, but Streep's thin and weak singing voice is almost always slightly sharp, while Tomlin's is very husky and always really flat. Even worse is Lindsay Lohan, who is completely unable to carry a tune, but does it very loudly. John C. Reilly (the best celebrity singer in the film) and Woody Harrelson play singing cowboys whose act consists of singing dirty songs. That shtick got old during their first song, but that didn't stop them from performing countless additional songs. My wife was completely bored and stopped watching about 20 minutes into the film. I barely made it to the unsatisfying end by fast-forwarding through a couple hundred of the songs, looking for the tiny snippets of easily predictable plot. If we are to take this dismal "backstage look at PHC" at face value, then I find it tragically ironic that the PHC stars make their livings "selling" to the rest of us what they themselves can never have. A note to movie directors: Over the years, Hollywood has proven over and over that you can teach a singer how to act, but it's almost impossible to teach an actor how to sing. So, if you're going to make a movie that's 95% singing, use real singers, to keep it from sounding like really bad auditions for American Idol.

I would've loved to have seen a real documentary of a real PHC performance with its real singers, comedy skits, and backstage business, but when the PHC movie finally ended, I just had to say it out loud: "I really hate this movie!" Years ago, I was a big fan of Garrison Keillor and his PHC radio show; I thought he was a very creative storyteller. Unfortunately, his 2-hour, PHC 2006 New Year's Eve snore-fest on PBS and this PHC movie lead me to conclude that Mr. Keillor has fallen in love with the sound of his own voice. Even when he interviews other people, their responses always remind him of stories from his own past, and he often ends up doing most of the talking. It's like he's under the delusion that everyone around him is there just to listen to him, and that the longer he drones on and on, and the more minutiae he includes in his stories, the more entertaining he will be. Don't be surprised if his next project consists entirely of him reading the Lake Wobegon telephone book out loud. And don't be surprised if it wins several awards.