What we have lost
Sometimes a movie, intentionally or not, perfectly captures the emotional landscape of an era. Robert Altman's new film, "Prairie Home Companion," based on Garrison Keillor's long-running radio show of the same name, can be seen as simply a folksy tale about an old-time radio show doing its farewell performance. But it is also a dead-on parable of the sense of loss and despair many Americans feel after six years of George W. Bush, the Iraq War, and the staining of much that was good and right and joyful about their country.
I have no doubt this is what Keillor and Altman intended. It isn't even all that subtle. Keillor's radio show in the film is doing its final performance because a Texas businessman has purchased the radio station that hosts the show as well as the (F. Scott) Fitzgerald Theatre in St Paul, Minn., where the real show also performs. Known only as "The Axeman," this Texan intends to raze the theater. The Axeman is described verbally before he is seen, and the words form a picture of Bush. He is played by Tommy Lee Jones, an ironic touch given that Jones was Al Gore's roommate at Harvard.
The Axeman is an uncultured and heartless businessman who doesn't even know who F. Scott Fitzgerald was. Informed that many of the members of the troupe have devoted their lives to it, he comments that now, "they'll be free to do something else." One is reminded of Bush's infamous speech in India earlier this year in which he airly waved away the threat of outsourcing to American I.T. jobs, saying that displaced workers could now train for "21st century jobs."
Yet it isn't heavy-handed. The focus of the film is the show itself, full of wonderful folk and country music and humor. Some of it is presented by the real members of Keillor's show, including Keillor himself, but most is by the actresses Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, and the actors Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly. The music offers an America of peaceful and tolerant values, of love and family. It is religious at times, but a very personal, heartfelt, and ultimately friendly religion, not the hard-edged beliefs of the howling American Taliban to which our lamentable President panders. You listen to all this and know that the goodness at its core will soon die, but not by its own hand.
The last six years have been a voyage of despair for many Americans, and not just liberals. There is no place for the massacre of innocents, or the casual torture of captives in the values of people who listen to "Prairie Home Companion." We have seen horrors we never expected to see, or thought were at worst a distant relic of our frontier past. Americans, if they are honest with themselves, have been forced to abandon the quaint notion, born of historical amnesia, that we are a unique, chosen people. In fact, we are just the latest country in the world's long history to gain great wealth, power, and influence and then lose it, or risk losing it, because of foolishness and stupidity. That isn't an easy conclusion to accept, but until we do there is no way back to what was.
Altman, who is 81 and no pie-eyed optimist, tricks the viewer by convincing him for a time that the bad Texan will be taken away by divine intervention, and that good will triumph. I won't give the ending away, but ultimately it is not what the audience expects, or probably wants. Suffice it to say it is a realistic ending.
(You can see "Prairie Home Companion" at the Midtown Theater in Harrisburg)