Don't miss this inspired PBS film on Garrison Keillor
Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes, an American Masters PBS documentary about one of the nation's most distinctive and beloved humorists, doesn't debut until Wednesday night. But I am writing about this remarkable American Master film now to give you time to clear your schedule or set your TiVo to make sure you do not miss it.
Nobody does biography like American Masters, the PBS signature series founded by Baltimore native Susan Lacy. In recent years, some entries in the series have a felt a little rushed and thin, but when this series gets it right the result is stunning. American Masters has not gotten a biography this right since its dazzling film on Leonard Bernstein that Lacy herself directed.
The producer and director here is Peabody and Emmy Award winner Peter Rosen, and he and his crew foillowed Keillor and his Prairie Home Companion crew around the country for most of a year to make the documentary. The power of this film is in the revealing -- and even transcendent -- moments that Rosen captures with his lens.
One such moment involves a sumertime stage performance ofthe Prairie Home Companion radio show on a converted softball field in a small Minnesota town that Keillor himself compares to his beloved Lake Wobegone. As the performance gets underway, it starts to rain and a sea of embrellas sprouts up in front of the stage. But instead of remaining on the covered stage, Keillor walks out into the rain, among the the audience members sitting in folding chairs and on the ground and starts singing, "You Are My Sunshine."
The Depression-era song is moving enough in its own right, but the image and the sound of this unlikley looking entertainer standing among his fans, drenched to the bone, yet happily singing away is inspirational. And you can see his effect as audience members -- smiling joyfully as they momentarily forget the rain and sing along. His power is as palpable as that of a 1920s evangelist at a tent show out on the plains.
But Keillor is not selling religious hokum, he's selling an abolutely singular and inspired mix of smalltown nostalgia, love of the nation, irony, whimsy and keen insight into the human heart. I suppose the only apt comparison is to Mark Twain, but Twain could not deliver the kind of warm and winning music Keillor does with his hand-picked band of Prairie Home Companion musicians.
The final scene of the film rattles around in the heart and brain long after the final credits roll. As Keillor delivers a meditation in voiceover on the role of kindness in the American life and the beauty of ordinary experience, Rosen shows him in a perfectly sculpted montage of audience scenes. In each, he is leading the crowd in singing, "America The Beautiful."
The final moment of the film finds him at a state fair show standing in the middle of a crowd with only a lone spotlight up in the grandstand casting its long arc of illumination through the black prairie darkness to lluminate his image on the infield. He is holding a microphone in one hand, as his other conducts the audience in song.
It is one of the richest and most elevating moments of non-fiction film that I have seen -- an image of solidarity between audience and artist, and community in the face of all that deep, rich, deadly and dark space once known as the frontier that so defines us as a people. If you can keep from weeping as you watch, you are made of sterner stuff than me.
The film airs at 8 p.m. Wednesday on MPT, and will be released on DVD July 7 from docuramafilms.
Comments
Hi David!
Excellent column re/ last night's American Masters PBS Garrison Keillor piece; your observations were right on and I too was deeply moved by this true national cultural treasure who has dedicated over 35 years of his creative life to "ordinary" America w/ his brilliant "Prairie Home Companion" productions, when in truth he is constantly revealing how truly 'extra-ordinary' the grassroots fabric of this country really is.
I'm a transplanted Canadian, having lived and worked in the U.S. for thirty years, but could not help but be inspired and moved by Keillor's devotion to remembering, and extolling the down-home humor, faith and honest-to-goodness-ness of the American heartland, especially his beloved brethren of Minnesota.
One minor critique; you kind of added a few too many "e"s in your spelling of "Wobegon", as I believe you likely wrote it out like it sounds. No biggie.
Other than that little 'blip' it was a solid piece of journalism.
May "Prairie Home Companion" live on for another 35 years.
Thanks, David.
Hi Alex, Thank you for taking the time to post this comment. It gives me joy to know someone enjoyed that splendid documentary as much as me. And Wobegone is now fized. Thanks. Z
Posted by: ALEX MCCRAE | July 2, 2009 1:32 PM
> The film airs at 8 p.m. Wednesday
I can't seem to find the date when this was posted. To which Wednesday does the author refer, the 8th of July? Is the DVD released prior to the broadcast?
it was published on June 30th. Look one post up the line, and you will see the date. So, it refers to June 1st. The DVD is June 7. Z
Posted by: Finn McGowan | July 2, 2009 1:44 PM
I'm back!
David, in watching the Garrison Keillor 'doc' last evening I couldn't help but see a kinship w/ Keillor's folksy style of grass-roots humor, and one of Canada's most revered turn-of-the-century humorists, the great Stephen Leacock, whose then world-renowned small-town fictional account of the Southern Ontario town of Mariposa in his novel "Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town"
paralleled Keillor's loving tales in "Wobegon Days", "The Book of Guys", and Wobegon Boys".
Whew! Was that one sentence? (Sorry)
Leacock, ever a country boy at heart, spent his summers at Old Brewery Bay, in his day an actual working farm, just outside Orillia, Ontario, ironically many decades later the birthplace of Gordon Lightfoot, one of Canada's most stellar singer-songwriters of our era.
It was Leacok's getting to dialogue w/ the local-yokels, the dirt-under- the finger-nails, common folk of Orillia and environs that he gleaned so much of the anecdotally-based
humor for his fictional "Sunshine Sketches".
In checking up on Leacock on Wikipedia I was surprised to learn that the comedien Jack Benny had read several of Leakcock's satirical works when still strutting his schtick in vaudeville, and even turned his fellow comic, the young Groucho Marx onto the Leacock style of humor.
So many pop-psychologists today stress to their clients the importance of living in the moment, and looking
hopefully toward the future, yet I was struck by Keillor's take in the American Masters piece that nostalgia, and looking back on one's life is not a bad thing, but so very important in knowing from whence
we came, putting our ever-evolving lives into a comprehendible, and meaningful context.
David, thanks for allowing me to maybe open a few more hearts and minds to yet another great North American humorist, Stephen Leacock, solidly in the tradition of
Twain, Faulkner, and of course the incomparable, still-going-strong, Garrison Keillor.
(And man, can that guy ever sing sweet harmonies!)
Thanks, ALEX
Hi Alex, This is terrific. Thanks for the education in Leacock. Z
Posted by: ALEX MCCRAE | July 2, 2009 3:46 PM
I so looked forward to the Garrison Keillor profile. but the damnable HD got in the way. He looked like so grotesque. The new and improved (my arse) television stretched his face from one end of the screen to the other. I watched the Dolly parton concert in London the next night and it looked as if someone had used the computer to stretch her lips to resemble a characture of the Joker. Its a shame that I couldn't enjoy both wonderful programs because of the new technology. Shelock Holmes is on now and Jeromy Britt looks more like a well fed vampire rather than the tired and gaunt face I'm so accousted to.
JB
Baltimore
Posted by: JB hanson | July 5, 2009 8:19 PM
Yo JB (hanson) !
Sorry to hear about your less-than-optimal experiences in viewing both the Garrison Keillor American Masters PBS piece and the incomparable Miss Dolly Parton's London concert.
I don't, as yet, have the 'luxury' of the new-fangled Hi Def T.V. technology, but as you may have gathered from my earlier favorable comments on this blog re/ raconteur-extraordinaire, Keillor, I really enjoyed the recent excellent 'bio-doc'.
Let's face it, Garrison hasn't been blessed by stunning good looks, and I'm sure he would be the first to admit to his 'odd', angular, decidedly quirky appearance. But who cares? He's still a masterful talent, accomplished in so many creative genres over a long and distinguished career giving folks pleasure, and tons of belly laughs and chuckles, w/ his home-spun, down-to-earth wit.
So if the HD-effect is, indeed, factored into your home-viewing equation, I can see where poor looks-challenged Garrison might have come off as a little on the "grotesque", or gargoyle-ish side, but bless his big, open heart, he frankly doesn't deserve any undo on-screen 'distortion'.
As far as sweet Dolly being an innocent victim of the HD 'syndrome', as well, I've observed in her most recent T.V. interviews while plugging her "Nine To Five" Broadway play, that she appears to have undergone some major botox injections in her lips, which could account for your wanting to adjust your HD settings.
One consolation in an HD-altered Dolly would be the illusion of even a larger bust-size than she already has (no complaints there), which is probable her second best asset, after her incredible singing and tune-smithing. (Sorry, my male-chauvinist piggyness just reared its ugly head.)
JB, sometimes new technologies take a while to get used to, although in this case I'll give you the benefit of the doubt,until I convert, and check out the HD morphing factor for myself.
P.S.: JB, can you imagine watching one of those old classic Gumby stop-motion animated cartoons in Hi Def?
The first time I saw Mel Gibson's "Braveheart", in a 'discount'-type theater in Northridge CA,, the projectionist had screwed up on his choice of lenses, distorting all the characters in the opening sequences, stretching them vertically as if they were reflections in a fun-house mirror.
Tons of folks complained, but theater management refused to address the obvious distortion problem. Totally frustrated and ticked off, my girlfriend and I stomped out of the theater, demanded and got our money back.
This unfortunate experience colored my impression of "Braveheart" to this day.
I knew William Wallace's (as portrayed by Gibson) mounted band of rebel Scots road proud and high-in-the-saddle, but what WE saw at this particular matinee in the opening equestrian scenes of this award-winning, epic film was truly beyond ridiculous, the kilted riders being as many heads as tall as their elongated horses. Ugh!
Technology be damned!
Posted by: ALEX MCCRAE | July 6, 2009 7:48 PM