« Treading Water at the Movies with the NY Press | Main | The Year That Was: Life Lessons From The Reeler »
June 08, 2006
Grand Theft: Stunning Streep and Tomlin Steal 'Prairie Home Companion'
It's the singers, not the song: Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep and Lindsay Lohan in A Prairie Home Companion (Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon)
The Reeler caught up a few days ago with Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, who were making the New York rounds in support of their Robert Altman collaboration A Prairie Home Companion (opening Friday). "Brilliant" does not begin to describe their work as the film's singing sisters Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson, who join an ensemble of cast and crew roaming in and out of an episode of Garrison Keillor's long-running radio series. Joined by inept detective-cum-doorman-cum-narrator Guy Noir (Kevin Kline) and a fetching angel of Death (Virginia Madsen) who haunts the theater and its inhabitants, the entertainers share a moment they do not know is their last, a finality preordained in the long trajectory of corporate and cultural ambivalence.
That said, Prairie rejects mortality and bathos in exchange for a kind of impromptu dress eulogy--a full-hearted lament for something at the threshhold of a better residence in the cosmos. Altman being Altman, he indulges his typical pretentions (that floating camera his apologists love to praise feels less and less like a signature than it does a smudge) and often allows actors just enough rope to hang themselves (rambling duo Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly in particular). Oh, and some girl named Lohan appears as Streep's disillusioned teenage daughter, and as delightful as she is, she wields an almost unbearably strong screen presence for a 19-year-old. It provides the near-perfect balance in her languid, lovely scene with Streep and Tomlin in their Fitzgerald Theater dressing room; most other times, even in her silence, she virtually overpowers the frame.
Streep and Tomlin, though. Streep and Tomlin, maddeningly cool genius, the (literally) pitch-perfect syntheses of talent and imagination. Yammering, harmonzing and shuffling around the Fitzgerald, legends who couldn't care less about legend unless they are talking about their director, whom Streep had admired from a creative distance throughout the decades Tomlin dug into his troupe.
"Lily just said, 'Oh, you're going to love him,' " Streep told me. "And that was true. I knew that from everything I'd seen and everything I'd read, and I'd always wanted to work with him because of this way that he has of sort of opening the doors to actors." She turned to Tomlin. "You know how a lot of the directors don't like the actors to stand around the monitor?"
"No!" Tomlin said.
"They think you're lurking--"
"They do," Tomlin admitted, frowning. "It's like the old Hitchcock point of view. We're like cattle. Well--"
"Well--" Streep said.
"That's not really true of most directors," Tomlin continued. "They just don't want you to interfere. I think they're afraid they'll get derailed or something."
"Yes, they get derailed by too many opinions," Streep said.
"And actors definitely have opinions," Tomlin said.
"Altman would be back there and he'd say, 'Where is everybody? Where the hell is everybody?' " Streep said. "And then we'd all come, and then we could stand around the monitor and chat. And offer up our ideas. And he loves it."
"And he's totally unflappable about it--"
"Totally in control--"
"If he likes it, he really likes it. He doesn't really tell you at the moment if he likes it--"
"No. No. 'Well, that was adequate,' he says--"
"He's just there and he listens."
Yeah, well--Streep and Tomlin. You would be crazy not to listen. And at least for one film, with its maker's humane tandem of flaws and flourishes, you would be crazy to think you have a choice.
Posted by stvanairsdale at June 8, 2006 05:42 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.mcnblogs.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/1116