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Review:
 Oh
where oh where has Lake Wobegon gone? Oh where oh where could it
be? This mythical place is the heart and soul of pretty much
everything Garrison Keillor has done in the last three decades.
It's not there!!!!
Almost every Saturday afternoon from 5 to 7 PM fans tuned to NPR
and listened to Keillor sing songs, faux commercial jingles and
tell tales of "the little town that time forgot and the decades
cannot improve... where the women are strong, the men are good
looking, and all the children are above average". It would be
blasphemous to imagine that the first cinematic treatment of the
legendary show wouldn't even mention the place.
Yet this blasphemy is now the truth.
One of Keillor's minor characters, Guy Noir(Kevin Kline), former
detective and Nick Danger clone, is “vice president in charge of
security” for the company, narrator of the film and apparently,
this is the last performance of the show, as the radio station has
been bought by some insane Texans who want to turn the stately
Fitzgerald theater into a parking lot. What follows is a concert
film of sorts.
One the one hand, you've got Garrison Keillor doing Garrison
Keillor. He's got lots of fans and his music is kind of that old
fashioned country flavor that the real show's known for, with the
added attractions of Cowboy pranksters Dusty(Woody Harrelson) and
Lefty(John C. Reilly) plus the Johnson sisters: Rhonda(Lily
Tomlin) Yolanda (Meryl Streep) and the latter's daughter Lola
(Lindsay Lohan), who would be a goth had she not been stuck in
Northern Minnestoa. What do you expect? it's Altman, and that
means seventeen plots going on simultaneously and twice as many
characters.
The biggest problem is Keillor himself. He's supposed to be
beloved, and he's on the screen the most and has the least amount
of plot, a background character hogging the foreground when he's
given the best dialogue to everyone else. Sure, we get a strange
relationship between Guy Noir and a mysterious angel of
death(Virginia Madsen), and lots of blather between the cowboys
and the stage manager(Tim Russell) and among the Johnsons. It all
works in chunks, but all stitched together it's a bit flat.
Yeah, it's cute, but even if you're a Garrison Keillor fan, this
might be a disappointment. If you're not, forget it.
Eric Lurio
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