KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: * * * *
Verdict: Robert Altman's last film, a spinoff of a radio institution, is a homage to that institution and cracking old-time entertainment.
Garrison Keillor's 32-year-old radio show that shares this film's title - a genial, old-fashioned, rambling variety show, broadcast live, usually from the Fitzgerald Theatre in St Paul, Minnesota - has played on National Radio over a decade of summers. That should be all the advertising needed for the last film of the late, great Robert Altman, the maestro of the apparently formless ensemble fantasia.
Altman, like Keillor a Midwesterner, had the idea for the movie in the first place. He has long been a seasoned enough campaigner to know when to leave things alone and that's what he does here, letting a terrific cast loose on a notional final performance of the show and just watching, letting the camera move seamlessly between stage and backstage. The result is a movie that feels less like a documentary than a genial homage to a small but perfectly formed institution.
Though Keillor wrote (and often rewrote on set) the screenplay, the feel is pure Altman, doing the same for the radio show as Kansas City did for jazz and The Player did for Hollywood. Here the show is preparing for its final broadcast before the Fitzgerald is demolished (remember His Majesty's?) to make way for a parking lot. Keillor, playing a character called GK, the announcer, plays it straight: "Every show's your last show. That's my philosophy," he says and his loose-fleshed lugubrious face is in every frame as he helms proceedings with deceptive ease.
The film, like the show, is its cast: two cowboy singers, Dusty and Lefty (Harrelson and Reilly); Johnson sisters Yolanda and Rhonda (Streep and Tomlin), survivors of a quartet - "The Carter Family is like us, only famous," Yolanda says; Yolanda's disaffected teenage daughter Lola (an excellent Lohan); and several regulars from the real show including sound-effects master Tom Keith. Around the fringes prowl private eye Guy Noir (Kline, showing his comic chops) and a Mysterious Woman (Madsen), whose function has assumed added poignancy now.
If the film has a fault it's that the backstory about the impending closure seems a tad overwritten and underlines a point about transience that already saturates every frame. No matter. Keillor comments at one point of a character's smile that it is "so sweet you could pour it on pancakes". That goes for the movie too.
Cast: Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Garrison Keillor, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin
Director: Robert Altman
Running time: 105 mins
Rating: PG (contains coarse language)
Screening: Northcote Bridgeway, SkyCity Queen St, Berkley Mission Bay and Botany Downs, plus other locations around the country
