A Prairie Home Companion

One evening back in 1978, at the end of my undergraduate education in Minnesota, I went with a good friend and his family to a theatre in St. Paul where, for nearly four years, a storyteller and a group of musicians had performed a live radio show with something of a down home feel. Broadcast over Minnesota Public Radio, it had become a regional fixture, drawing listening audiences from around the state. On the stage that evening was a man in his mid-thirties, one Garrison Keillor, who delighted those present with his stories of the fictional Lake Wobegon, "where all the women are strong, all the men good-looking and all the children above-average."

A few years later, A Prairie Home Companion began to be syndicated across the United States, and Keillor became a household name. I cannot claim to have been a regular listener to the programme, but if I had nothing better to do on a saturday evening, I would tune it in for some light, homespun entertainment with gentle humour and a human touch. This was during my graduate student days in South Bend, Indiana.

Although it is still on the air, I've not listened to it in nearly two decades. However, at the weekend my wife and I decided to see Robert Altman's new cinematic version of A Prairie Home Companion at the Westdale Theatre near McMaster University. Because it's been so long since I last heard PHC on the radio, I cannot say how well the movie captures the current atmosphere of its namesake. That said, we could not unequivocally say that we liked what we saw. The film seemed to be something of a bizarre combination of the original PHC and an Ingmar Bergman film, with Nikos Kazantzakis providing the unsatisfying ending. Death was an overriding theme — something that seemed out of character with the PHC I remember from the 1970s and '80s. Oddly enough, Lake Wobegon was not even mentioned. There was no storytelling, only music with various morbid themes, including murder and suicide. There were some pleasant surprises, such as the discovery that Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep can sing. All in all, however, it is a shame to see Keillor, whom I recall to speak with such affection for the ordinary Lutheran and Catholic folk of his fictional hometown, peddling even a tongue-in-cheek nihilistic vision. Perhaps those Norwegian bachelor farmers can set him straight.