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Robert Altman's swan song

Robert Altman
  • Posted at 11:22am
  • 06 March 2009
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

For studio insurance purposes, Robert Altman, aged 80, was required to have a standby director on what turned out to be his last film, A Prairie Home Companion (Saturday 7 March, BBC2).

He chose Paul Thomas Anderson, half his age, director of Magnolia (a multi-story collage that had a touch of Altman's narrative democracy about it) and There Will Be Blood (which echoed his love of authentic locations).

In the end, Altman completed the picture, and lived to see its release. He died from leukaemia in November 2006, aged 81.

I was sad to see him go. The languid, grainy, challenging films he made on a roll in the 1970s – MASH, The Long Goodbye, Nashville, A Wedding and the less-celebrated Brewster McCloud – instilled a love of American film in me.

He lost his mojo in the 80s but found it in a big way in the 90s with Hollywood satire The Player and, even more spectacularly, Short Cuts (Tuesday 10 March, Film4), which, with its interlocking LA stories, was a direct influence on his future understudy's work.

In many ways, A Prairie Home Companion made a neat swan song for Altman, with its overlapping stories and its large cast.

The fictionalised account of a final recording of broadcaster Garrison Keillor's long-running radio variety show, it contains plenty of country music, which back-references Nashville – to my mind, Altman's masterpiece: a panoramic snapshot of Tennessee's "yee-haw" Mecca, with political paranoia thrown in for post-Watergate resonance.

Keillor's radio show, partly a fiction itself (it includes Keillor's "news" from the made-up town of Lake Wobegon), has been running on and off since 1974, the year Nashville was filmed.

It's not an easy film for a non-partisan audience to get into, though performers of the calibre of Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones and Kevin Kline provide a certain sparkle. Altman fans will see plenty of the old man's licks as his camera prowls the actual Fitzgerald Theatre in St Paul, Minnesota, where the radio show is made.

I wish I liked it more.

I met Altman in 2001, after he'd made the exquisite English country house murder mystery Gosford Park. I was surprised when he told me that story didn't interest him: "I'm more interested in the genre," he said. "Story doesn't mean much to me, I don't much care about it – stories are all pretty much basically the same."

What he liked was to take something familiar – the war movie, the western, the private eye thriller – and give it a twist. Perhaps this is why some were underwhelmed by Altman's final piece – it remains, at heart, a document of something that already exists. There's not much of a story, either.

In the same interview, Altman said he equated what he did with painting a mural: "Show me the wall, how big it is, and tell me how much paint I have. You give me a subject and I'll deal with that. If you say bears, I'll start painting bears."

I would like to have seen his film about bears.

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