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Closing Night 2006
Contributed by Sara Schieron
Saturday, 06 May 2006
A full house met the closing night screening for SF International Film
Festival, last night at the Castro. Introduced by Graham Leggat, the
film was preceded by the repetition of the Golden Gate Award winning
films. After a moderately vigorous intro by George Gund, Lilly Tomlin
and Virginia Madsen took stage. With the interest in leaving more for
the post-film Q&A, Tomlin said of her co-star Streep, "She wasn't
my first choice", and Madsen asked Leggatt in all sincerity, "Can we
start the movie?"
Altman's most recent film, A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION lends a loose narrative to the long running, old time, radio variety show, starring Garrison Keillor. Set in the Fitzgerald Theatre in Minnesota, (the same theatre the true to life Prairie Home Companion shows are performed weekly to paying audiences), the film expectantly floats from conversation to conversation, speckled with moments of tension and (of course) overlapping dialogue. The only odd, if logical addition to this story about a tradition of yore, it an explicit dread for the future, which we see in many shapes and forms, but most noticeably in the character of Dangerous Woman, played by Madsen. As if the camera work isn't ghostly enough, the character of Dangerous Woman, (a common femme fatale shaped inhabitant of Guy Noir's excessively stylized audio universe) is transformed into angel for the film. Comforting the downtrodden, she glides from character to character reassuring them that life does go on and that they should "forgive shortcomings" and "be thankful for the love and care given". Both sweet and darkly old world, the voice of the angel, as well as her presence are a repeated harbinger of death.
As we meet the show on its last performance, all of the employees are aware that "the Axeman" is coming to end the run of the Prairie Home Companion forevermore. Yet the death of the show is not the end of it because with the show goes the old landmark of a theatre that frames its iconic traditionalism. Both show and theatre are scheduled for replacement by entertainments financed by a "big company" (the film's opposing, if hazy antagonist). What's incredible about this treatise on death is that the tentacles of this theme extend in absolutely all directions. The mortality of the narrator, Keillor, is at stake, as is the mortality of the honorable director, a man who, for insurance purposes, was required to hire a "back up" director to protect him from any physical inability that might hinder his completion of the film (read that "fulfillment of contract"). This is to say nothing about the other brands of death that pervade: in the film we lose cast members, hear (from the Axeman himself) that small time bands (like the one he was in before he lost his soul to the corporate gods) have to go because they're not very good, and allusions to the end of the nuclear family are also made with Maya Rudolf's single pregnant/mother character. It's a fascinating notion, this idea of loss, but if nothing else, what the film initiates is the idea that death has something of a rolling toll. It's not completely sad that the show is lost. The secondary characters are retaliatory about it but Keillor, ever scowling, says only what he's said before: "I'll get another job...maybe one where I don't talk much." His scowling deadpan far more engaging than I expected, perhaps that's not so farfetched. The film, which ends on an ellipsis, tests the old values and their durability. After all this, even in the Midwest, can the old America persevere?
Following the film, Tomlin and Madsen approached the stage and were greeted to some playful questions. Tomlin, who seemed loaded with acerbic quotes about her co-star, Streep, did a fantastic job speaking lightly about the heaviest of material. "Bob would say the whole thing is about death....Me, I was just interested in making Meryl laugh. I did everything I could to make her laugh. Of course, she'd see Kevin [Kline], who she's known for ages and sit with him and he'd do nothing and she'd laugh and laugh." Punctuated with deadpan pauses, it's clear Tomlin hasn't really stopped being an onstage comic. When she told Altman she might not be able to sing, she reports he told her "if you sing badly, you'll sing badly." After two months of lessons, one can't imagine she was pleased to hear that.
Slightly less comfortable onstage, (though not without her glamour) Madsen, showed quite the enthusiasm about her part in the film. "For some scenes, there would be four cameras moving on different parts of the stage, down the aisles on cranes, across the stage on dollies, backstage, they were everywhere... and we'd do 10-20 minutes scenes in one run. I got in the habit of coming to work and just waiting around until he'd tell me to wander the set, then if he liked how it looked he'd keep it in."
Lucid as these scenes sound, a great deal of these vivid, semi-improvised moments found their way to the cutting room floor. "I did this part in the song we do for our mother," Tomlin said, "when we say, "we didn't have vacations...our momma scrubbed floors" and I said, "but we still had fun" and I came up with this whole story about how she'd boil a cob of corn and throw it on the ground and all four sisters would go after it and play pig, and I thought it was hysterical, but it wasn't played funny, it was sincere.... it didn't make it in."
On the subject of their long time working relationship, Tomlin said of Altman, "he works just like he always has", to which Madson responded, "he likes to let actors do what actors do." Then Graham Leggat told them they should tell a story and the two went into a muddle of almost rehearsed sounding overlapping speech about a story - who knows what they saying. In the end, Tomlin got out something that sounded like, ‘and there was Meryl, huge on the front page of the newspaper, and you could see some cut off teeth on the right and that was me.'
In sum, the event to conclude the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival was just a closing evening as it was a herald of the year to come. With a reel of recollections from the past 49 years, and some images of this year's events, Leggat thanked the guests for attendance, thanked Tomlin and Madsen, and reminded the crowd that planning for year 50 would begin at midnight. There sure must be a lot of dancing in next year's proposed events because the publicists, programmers, and organizers alike were planning awfully hard.
