A Prairie Home Companion

What’s the Story?

In A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION, Lola (Lindsay Lohan) spends most of her time behind the scenes at her mom Yolanda's (Meryl Streep) 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, the angst-ridden teen writes dark poems. Surrounded by adults, wants to be heard and to disappear, and she's distracted by a mysterious family history. The crew has just learned that the radio station has been sold and the show cancelled. For their last show, the regulars perform, quarrel, and make up. Security guard, Guy Noir (Kevin Kline), spots an intruder, a Dangerous Woman (Virginia Madsen), who wanders through the 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. With Yolanda watching from offstage, Lola makes her first public performance on the show's last night. And in this moment, she emerges from the dressing room to reveal old-fashioned talent and scrappy ingenuity.

Is It Any Good?

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 in Lola that the film locates something like a conventional narrative, for better and worse.

Lola's transformation is heartening. 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.