June 16, 2006
a prairie home companion
Who do you think is running Congress? Farmers? Engineers? Teachers? Businessmen? No, my friends. Congress is run by lawyers. A lawyer is trained for two things and two things only. To clarify - that's one. And to confuse - that's the other. He does whichever is to his client's advantage. Did you ever ask a lawyer the time of day? He told you how to make a watch, didn't he? Ever ask a lawyer how to get to Mr. Jones' house in the country? You got lost, didn't you? Congress is composed of five hundred and thirty-five individuals. Two hundred and eighty-eight are lawyers. And you wonder what's wrong in Congress. No wonder we often know how to make a watch, but we don't know the time of day.
Is this really that different from Garrison Keillor's schtick?
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Directors change and huzzah for that — just try not to go for the okey-doke hustled out in note after note, including interviews with Altman himself, wherein he's now on accounta his octogentility making movies about death, and the passing away of some mythic form of the American way. O McCabe in the snow, O McCloud crashing toward the Astroturf™, O gun passing through the crowds of Nashville — what were those about, then?
It's the last that begs the question, not because it's canonical but because it's the same movie as A Prairie Home Companion thirtyone years earlier, cascading dialogue and provisional conversations while everyone's preparing for the next staged set piece and actors pretending to be character actors pretending to be semipro singers vamping the Americana and gosh, maybe Altman hasn't changed!
Except he has, and gulls can call it "sweetness" all they want, or maybe he drank the Kool-Aid up Wobegon way, but the change is basically in the way that, over the three decades since Nashville (and if the current historical conjuncture calls up any other year, 1975 is not a poor candidate — cue the helicopter over the Baghdad Hilton), Altman has concluded that old-timey Americana values, the loss of which are forever being bemoaned by millionaire populists and candidates, are indeed just plain good, rather than the petri dish of ideologues. So he's replaced Nashville's Hal Phillip Walker, America-for-Americans demagogue, with St. Paul's Garrison Keillor (the guy who ruined a perfectly good spanking of Bernard-Henri Lévy by pompously offering as Le Grand Conclusion that pompous little furriners oughtn't write about America if they can't set their own houses in order — our favorite form of nitwit provincialism!) in about the same spot in about the same structure: the radio voice at the center of the polyvocal web that Altman habitually throws across some particular time and place to capture what's past, and passing, and to come.
You'd think a person of Altman's cut would make this move, this substitution, to shore up our perception of Keillor as the latest in a line of such demagogues, which is what he is, retooled for NPR with a mildly different, Northern plains fundamentalism. No. The movie is still about death and Americana and mythic loss; these have ever been his subjects. What's changed is Altman's stance toward these things; piercing dubiety has melted away into its opposite, and jus' plain folks piety rules the day. In that regard, alas, Mr. Altman knows exactly what time it is.