This is an indication of what’s right and agreeable about Robert Altman‘s A Prairie Home Companion in the manner of Altman’s best films, but the way costar Meryl Streep puts it….well. Here she is, talking to the Washington Post‘s Michael O’Sullivan: “‘Usually you know immediately, if the screenplay announces its tone, its darkness, its — you know — you can sort of predict, from the first 15 pages, when things are going to blow up physically or metaphorically, and how it’s going to resolve, and the whole schwing of it, and what the feel of the whole thing is. The gestalt just kind of announces itself. [But] this one was just such an odd little creature. It just sort of danced along, seemingly on the surface of things, and had some laughs and some poignancy and some sweet characters and some odd things and some dirty jokes, and I didn’t know’ — here the actress pauses dramatically before shouting into a reporter’s ear — ‘what they were doing.'”