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Common Sense Note

Parents should know the film explores the idea of death, featuring a metaphorical figure (a woman in a white raincoat who is both an "angel of death" and a dead woman brought to temporary life). One character writes poems about suicide, another dies backstage, asleep in a chair, and others respond with tears on discovering his body (the dead man had arranged for a sexual interlude). The on-stage radio show includes bawdy jokes about sex (mostly using euphemisms) and minor quarrelling between former lovers and sisters. Characters smoke and drink liquor. A cowboy performer holds a prop gun. Mild language (one s-word, some uses of "hell" and "damn"), including sexual and body parts references.

Families can discuss the film's contemplation of death, as an inevitable transition (characters' deaths as well as the passing of the radio show). How does Lola's initial interest in suicide reflect her own adolescent worries about expectations, as well as her family's knotty emotional history? How does she reconcile with her nervous, distracted mother through their shared love of music and desire for connection?

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Common Sense Review

Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs

Like other Robert Altman movies, A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION is meandering and provocative, a contemplation of familial and romantic relationships that leads to small revelations. It is also a movie starring Lindsay Lohan, here playing Meryl Streep's daughter.

Lohan's Lola spends most of her time behind the scenes at her mom Yolanda's radio show, which is fashioned after the show that screenwriter and costar Garrison Keillor has been performing for 32 years. As her mother and Aunt Rhonda (Lily Tomlin) prepare to go onstage as the singing Johnson Sisters, Lola buries herself in her notebook, where she writes poems about suicide ("You are toast"). She wears glasses, her hair hangs down, and her shirt is baggy, signs of a typical teeny angst. Surrounded by adults, Lola is at once alienated and immersed, wanting both to be heard and to disappear. She's a kid, and she has a lot on her mind.

Lola's discomfort has to do with a family history she wants to probe. And so it's appropriate that the film takes place, as radio show host G.K. (Keillor) tells his audience, on "a quiet night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets," that is, St. Paul, Minnesota. The mood backstage is grim, as the crew has just learned that the radio station has been sold and the show cancelled (the corporate threat is embodied by a suit called the Axeman and played by the odious Tommy Lee Jones). For their last night, the regulars perform, quarrel, and make up, while the security guard, Guy Noir (Kevin Kline), keeps watch. In between rolling his own cigarettes and manning the desk at the backstage door, Guy spots an intruder, a Dangerous Woman (Virginia Madsen) who walks right in, wearing a stunning white raincoat and a whiff of femme fatale.

This seeming angel of death wanders through the Fitzgerald Theater, unnerving Guy and reminding you that death is ever imminent. As if to stave it off, the performers stick to their routines, singing old songs, cracking old jokes, remembering old times. Yolanda, for one, also takes pride and finds energy in her daughter, and it is in Lola that Prairie Home Companion locates something like a conventional narrative, for better and worse.

With Yolanda watching from offstage, Lola makes her first public performance on the show's last night. And in this moment, she emerges from her cocoon in the dressing room into a kind of lit-up, much-appreciated sensation, revealing old-fashioned talent and scrappy ingenuity. Wearing a t-shirt reading "Extinction is forever," she swings into an unexpected and inventive rendition of "Frankie and Johnny".

Lola's transformation, like Lohan's, is heartening (and you can't help but hope that Lohan stays in touch with her new friend Meryl Streep). By film's end, Lola's transformed yet again, resembling a corporate sort herself, in a snappy suit and wielding a cell phone with headset, swooping through town to offer her mother advice on looking after her "assets." It's a brief moment, a lively and broadly comic coda. It's something else as well, an acknowledgment rather than an out-of-hand condemnation of time's toll. It's possibility.

Families who like this movie should also see Altman's Gosford Park or Nashville (both rated R).

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