So many of Robert Altman’s movies contain a death or wounding. Amidst the grim frivolity or serious misanthropy, the genre parodies or multi-level narratives, death stalks. Altman must have known that A Prairie Home Companion (2006) might be his last film. He was living with a transplanted heart and suffering from cancer. The film’s producers were worried enough to have Paul Thomas Anderson on set as a backup director. No wonder that death in person wanders through the film, undercutting the music and the comedy with her persistent presence. This chapter offers a retrospective of Altman’s films from the vantage point of the bitter-sweet nostalgia for death in his last work.
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