Friday, June 9, 2006 (opening night)
Robert Altman makes movies that I love to watch. You can rank his films from best to worst, qualifying them in terms of their historical significance or how engaging the story is, but all of them are exciting to watch for the mass-personality clashes of his characters. There's always an ensemble cast (at least judging by the portion of his filmography with which I'm familiar) and his camera that pans and zooms conspicuously among them, embellishing the disparity in their traits.
A Praire Home Companion reminded me of one of my favorite Altman flicks, Cookie's Fortune--perhaps one of the most disliked films to his credit. Here, I must insert my praise for Cookie's Fortune so as to give a bit of context of my affection for A Praire Home Companion. The former film is sweet to its southern characters, and doesn't play into Hollywood stereotypes and popular misconceptions about the slow pace of southern culture. Not all folks below the Mason-Dixon lack sophistication or are just plain dumb because of a little drawl, but surely there are a few fluttery types that emerge among that population, just like in any group of people, northern or otherwise. What makes Cookie's Fortune hilarious is the intersection of both smart and naive kinds of characters that have the ability to make a simple task absurdly complex. Altman's weaving and zooming camera embellishes that. It's unbelievable and plain funny to see those characters move about the same space, for such different reasons, topple over one another, and finally find resolve.
I was beaming while watching many of the scenes in A Praire Home Companion, much the same way I did with Cookie's Fortune, particularly the brilliant scenes seamlessly played between Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, with a bit of accent from Lindsay Lohan. This time it wasn't a sweet southern accent, but a flat, jerky Minnesotan-speak that permeated the vocals of the cast. True to Altman form, it was a quirky bunch of mis-matched personalities huddled together in a local country theater that, like the folks from Cookie's, deal with complex things in a simple, unpretentious manner. An old man dies and a young star is born on stage, and the characters know the significance of each event. They are not composed. We see them move and and turn with tears and simple human spirit, framed tenderly and gracefully by a camera that tells everything they're feeling by the movement of the lines on their faces.
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