Black Doves is 2024 six episode Netflix series; A Prairie Home Companion was made in 2006 by Robert Altman and is that filmmaker's last movie. The two pictures are polar opposites and, perhaps, worth considering in contrast to one another. Altman's picture, a record of Garrison Keillor's long-running variety show on public radio, preserves for history a live performance of an atypical episode of the program -- almost without exception, Keillor's radio show featured a monologue by the host chronicling events in "Lake Woebegone", the imaginary village in rural Minnesota described by Keillor each week and in a series of novels; there is no monologue in Altman's film and the show is essentially a revue of sentimental hillbilly songs. Keillor's program was more eclectic with many cornball skits, not too funny, but mildly amusing. The movie is warm and humane, alert to the foibles and vanity of its characters, and a moving meditation on the inevitability of death. Altman was dying of leukemia when he made the picture in St. Paul; the auteur Paul Thomas Anderson (There will be Blood, Magnolia and Licorice Pizza among others) was on-hand to take over the film's direction if ill-health caused Altman to falter -- he didn't. (Anderson is married to one of the performers in the movie, Maya Rudolph, who was heavily pregnant in real life when the picture was made.) Altman's final picture -- A Prairie Home Companion (PHC) was released in June 2006; the director died in November of that year -- is successful, and although it's plot is silly, the movie is about something moving and important: stoicism in the face of death. By contrast, Black Doves, equally, or, even, more silly, is a meretricious thriller that stages two score showy deaths on-screen but that, in the end, fails because we don't care about who is killing whom. After the first couple murders, death by gunfire or bludgeon or knife becomes commonplace; no one seems fazed by the carnage and the intricate plot is too implausible and complex to care about.
It's probably unfair to couple PHC with Black Doves to the disadvantage of the latter -- Altman was a famous, controversial director who either made great movies or miserable, idiosyncratic flops; he took risks and allowed his actor's improvise, devising his films on the fly -- when this worked, he created masterpieces; when things fell apart, his pictures, although never less than interesting, could be annoying, slapdash follies, self-indulgent to the point of calamity. PHC falls midway between being a chaotic mess and a great film -- it's more great than chaotic, but throughout the hour and 45 minute work, the tightrope walker is always poised to fall off the high wire; this audacious risk-taking is part of the appeal of the film but the picture's plotless and improvised meanderings won't satisfy some audiences. By contrast, Black Doves is very tightly scripted. There's only one problem: the script doesn't make a lot of sense and, since most of the show's players are just cannon fodder, we don't really care about their picturesque slaughter.
Black Doves names a secret cabal of spies. They work freelance, are utterly ruthless, and, apparently, sell their intelligence to the highest bidder. Helen Webb, played by Keira Knightly, is an operative married to conservative British MP; he's successful as a politician and the film suggests that he is in line to be the next Prime Minister -- some of the show's action takes place at 10 Downing Street. Helen is transmitting information about her husband's activities to her handler, Reed, a plump woman with blonde hair who is also a brutal and pragmatic murderer. The show's premise is that the Chinese ambassador to the Britain has been murdered under circumstances that suggest CIA involvement. An international crisis is looming. To add to the tension, the ambassadors daughter, a heroin junkie, has been kidnapped by person's unknown. None of this would affect the show's protagonist, Helen Webb, except for the fact that her husband is managing the international crisis and her lover, somehow entangled in the intrigue involving the Chinese ambassador and his daughter, has been murdered. Helen, who is a lethal killer, sets out to butcher the persons responsible for her boyfriend's death. (Of course, her staid, virtuous, and dull politician husband doesn't known that his wife has been cheating on him with a hunky and shady spy.) The ensuing bloodbath, extended over six fifty minute episodes, takes place around Christmas. This allows the producers to inject into the mayhem a counter-point of hymns, Christmas pageants, and happy shoppers thronging the fashionable London stores. The Christmas motif is used opportunistically for irony -- the rhetorical points about Christmas in contrast to bloody assassinations and shootouts are shallow and don't add much to the story. Ultimately, it appears that a number of vicious groups of murderers are competing to either solve the diplomatic crisis or deepen it into a third world war -- MI5 gets into the act as do a mob of sadistic local gangsters, the Clark's, modeled it seems on the Kray crime family, as well as various CIA operatives and deadly Black Dove spies. Everyone is killing everyone else to the point that there is a big shoot-out in Episode Five in which I had no idea who the combatants were -- although the fighting leaves the streets comically littered with gory corpses. (There are no police in evidence and the show implies that mass killing on lonely London streets resulting in up to 17 casualties or more is simply commonplace in the British capital.) Joe Barton wrote the script and it is intermittently ingenious although quickly devolving into absurdity. To say that Barton is cynical would be a gross understatement -- the show is nihilistic with people tasked to kill their own fathers and relatives. The first few episodes are reasonably compelling -- Webb's dilemma is that she may admire (if not love) the politician to whom she is married and by whom she has two children; but her metier is betrayal and, for about half of the show, we are interested to some extent in her conundrum. But, when the bodies start piling up, and the show becomes too complex to understand, Helen's problems seem trivial compared to the apocalyptic stakes in which the show traffics: the Chinese and Americans are about to get into an exchange of nukes. There are colorful characters, a couple of female assassins are amusing (one of them speaks in an amusing Irish brogue); Sam, a gay "triggerman" (or assassin), is dispatched to protect Helen from the army of bad guys trying to liquidate her -- Sam is sad-eyed and sensitive when he's not shooting people and he's haunted by memories of murders in which he's been involved. He's given a love-interest and, in the midst of massacres, pauses sometimes to kiss and caress his boyfriend. Minute by minute, the show is well-made, the noisy action scenes are nicely choreographed (although idiotic -- as one might expect our heroine is essentially impervious to the holocaust of ordinance unleased on her) and the dialogue is sharp; some of the situations are interesting. But there's no suspense and the narrative, although plotted to within an inch of its life, is incomprehensible. The film-making is state-of-the-art, although there are way too many flashbacks that impede the progress of the story.
These kinds of shows always feature evil masterminds delivering baroque threats to the protagonists in the story. But these protagonists have distinguished themselves by murdering in brutal duels about ten people per episode. So I'm always puzzled why these nasty villains dare to insult and threaten the assassins working for them. Why don't these resourceful, athletic killing machines just put an end to the cruel bosses who are pulling their strings? It's a puzzle that I found particularly distracting in Black Doves. I recall Martin Ritt's Western Hombre. In that film, Richard Boone, playing a particularly sadistic and vicious outlaw, goes for a parley with the hero played by Paul Newman. Boone makes a number of hair-raising threats -- the scene takes place on an extended ladder-like flight of steps leading down into a mine pit in which Boone is torturing a kidnapped woman to death. At the end of his harangue, Paul Newman responds: "I've just got one question for you. How are you going to get down these steps?" Whereupon Hombre pulls his gun and drilled Richard Boone with a couple of well-placed (if non-lethal) shots.) Throughout Black Doves, I listened to the bad guys threatening Helen Webb and her allies with all sorts of hideous torture -- so why didn't the targets of these gaudy rants just pull out their firearms and put an end to all this nonsense. It makes no sense.
Black Doves features about a dozen murders per episode -- it entertains us with violent death. Only one person dies in A Prairie Home Companion, an elderly singing cowboy (played by one of Peckinpah's favorite thugs, L. Q. Jones). The old man is preparing for a sexual tryst with a lunch lady who provides sandwiches to the cast and crew of the PHC show. When the man's death by heart attack is discovered, the show members are distraught but continue with the program -- the show must go on. This subplot mirrors the larger narrative of the movie: the network on which the show is broadcast has been purchased by some religious businessmen in Texas who have decided to cancel the show and, even, tear down the regal old theater from which the program originates. The movie is about death and facing death, mortality, and the inevitable end of things. Performers in the show beleaguer Garrison Keillor, the program's writer, main singer, and producer, to memorialize the passing of the show and the old cowboy singer as well. Keillor, who is playing a bemused version of himself, refuses -- he simply says that people serve best when they do their jobs and insists that the program come to an end without any showy eulogies or tributes. The film's ethos is embedded in a particular form of Midwestern pessimism, the darkness of the Scandinavians who settled this frigid and barren country. Emotions shouldn't be on display. People need to do their work without much in the way of self-reflection or self-awareness. Let the old, sentimental songs, as it were, carry the burden of the elegy that is implicit in the film's narrative. (The music carries the emotion; the characters, if not laconic, are mostly incapable of expressing their feelings.) Keillor's script adapts parts of his 1991 masterpiece, the great novel WLT: A Radio Romance and fans of the Prairie Home show will see on-screen many of the local stalwarts who made the program and appeared every weekend at the live shows at the Fitzgerald theater for more than 30 years. Actors revered Robert Altman and would work for pennies to appear in his movies: the film has an all-star cast that is very effectively deployed -- Woody Harrelson, Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep, John C. Reilly, Lindsay Lohan, and Kevin Kline to mention just a few. In effect, Altman's movie is a musical. The show represents the ultimate development of the director's trademark dialogue style of chaotic overlapping voices -- the lines delivered by the actor's are illustrated by the songs that follow one after another and that form the subtext to the dialogue: there is always music being played on-stage while the characters speak to one another as they wait in the wings to appear. You have to be alert to listen for principal strands of discourse while, at the same time, hearkening to the musical commentary on the action. Altman crowds his frames with bric-a-brac, backstage junk, posters, and souvenirs of all sorts, the kind of detritus that would accumulate in the studios of a show that has been on the air for thirty years. There are only a few close-ups, elegant shots of performers on-stage, the camera sliding around them to keep them positioned at center frame. Most of the images feature Altman's ensemble, groups of five or six figures all packed together in small dressing rooms or backstage waiting to perform. There are only three or four exterior shots. The bulk of the movie takes place in the network of small chambers and subterranean corridors at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul (from which the radio show was often broadcast) and where the movie was filmed. (A penultimate sequence is shot on-location in the iconic Mickey's Diner near the Fitzgerald in St. Paul). Paralleling the action of the "Axe-man", the corporate guy dispatched to shut-down the show (played by Tommy Lee Jones), an angel of death stalks the theater, a woman who is both a ghost and an emblem of mortality -- she died on the road in a car-crash while traveling to see her lover at a cabin up north. (She is puzzled by the fact that she lost control of the vehicle because she was laughing at one of Keillor's cornball jokes that, she observes, wasn't even funny.) The mise-en-scene and photography by the great Ed Lachman reminds me of the very crowded images in movies by G. W. Pabst, particularly The Threepenny Opera and Pandora's Box -- it's overstuffed with gorgeous actors bathed in shadows or amber light. The feeling in the film is one of autumnal chaos -- the audience has to be complicit in constructing the story from the fragmentary dialogue, snippets of speeches, and the accompanying music performed on-stage. This tone of autumnal chaos reminds me of Renoir's late films, particularly The River and The Golden Carriage. beautiful things with highly diffuse plots. This is high praise, a big exaggerated I admit -- the movie is excellent but not transcendent -- but, I think, honest and valid. The film is very moving, stands up to repeated viewings and is excellent in most respects. It's not flawless: some of the fart jokes are unnecessary and distracting and there are parts of the picture that lag. But this film made by Robert Altman during the year of his death is a worthy valediction.
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