(A Superhero Named) Tony

Lola: Don’t you want people to remember you?
GK: I don’t want them to be told to remember me.

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This is not meant to be an obit. This is not even meant to be a memorial or an appreciation. And it’s not much of a movie review either. You’ve been warned.

The time and place you view a film often influences your reaction to it. I did not see A Prairie Home Companion until after Robert Altman’s death. The timing just worked out that way, yet I briefly wondered how differently I might have reacted to the film had I seen it while he was still living (and, for that matter, had I seen it in the theater, because few people can wield a widescreen like Altman). Such wondering is a waste, though, because to watch A Prairie home Companion as Altman’s final film is to do a disservice both to it and to the director. Altman may have had his own poor health and waning years on his mind when he made the film, but Garrison Keillor’s character more or less demands that you not watch it that way.

So I should simply accept that the film first affected me as I did not expect, on a gut level kind of emotional way where mortality makes you smile to spite it, where you reconcile the past, accept the present and expect the future not because it’s crystal clear but because it’s, well, the only thing you can do. Yet there’s as much aged, hangdog durability to it as there is joyful vitality. Or, as Garrison Keillor put it, “Every show is your last show.”

How punk rock is that?

The corny reviewer side of my brain comes up with all sorts of adjectives to describe the film, but “elegiac” and “autumnal” are by far tied for first. “Autumnal” is probably the cornier of the two for the sake of its pun: The emotions of A Prairie Home Companion are dependent both on the film’s persistently old-timey nostalgia and on its earth tone palette, which is a mix of browns and oranges that remind me of the candlelit interiors of McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Like so many others my age, my first exposure to Altman was Popeye. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about the Hollywood hubbub around its overproduction and terrible reception any more than I was about where it might fit in the mighty director’s oeuvre. But hot damn, I enjoyed that octopus fight. It wasn’t until several years and some cinema education later that I could recognize that hermetic fishing town as indicative of something common in Altman’s better ensemble-driven films: backstage drama.

“Backstage drama,” as I see it, is just what it sounds like, a drama that takes place behind the scenes. As a cynical youth, I’m sure I considered it all only stories for the drama club kids. As a broad-minded old sage, I’ve come to realize it’s stories that end with putting on a show. Mickey and Judy kind of stuff.

But not so for Altman, because he knew that backstage drama doesn’t require a stage to be in back of. It really requires the wackiness that ensues in an ersatz family — which could also be a small town, a medic unit, a gaggle of house servants, or in this case the more traditional cast and crew of a stage show. It’s those same kind of relationships that inspire people to write shows about working in an office or make movies about making movies. (And, in the end, someone always puts on a show. Or a football game.)

The trick with A Prairie Home Companion is that it’s not just about those relationships, it’s about the looming end of those relationships, a divorce, a death in the family. I’m not the first to point out Altman’s preoccupation with the bitter end, but I am the one who’ll mightily defend that preoccupation from being labeled “dark” (unless you’re talking about Altman’s comedy, which we all know he takes black; but black comedy is still funny).

With A Prairie Home Companion, death is the end, but the end justifies the means. And the means are those relationships. Convince me that’s dark.

Finally, at the risk of turning this into the obit I promised it wasn’t, the all too appropriate lines that inspired this post:

Dangerous Woman [the angel]: There is no tragedy in the death of an old man. Forgive him his shortcomings, and thank him for all his love and care.