The Cast of a Film Catches a Bad Case of the Oscars
*By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: November 17, 2006
One of the most endearing qualities of Christopher Guest’s films is the gee-whiz enthusiasm of the members of his informal repertory company. Like kids playing dress-up in an attic on a rainy Saturday afternoon, they can barely contain their seizures of delight when inspiration strikes, and the mood is contagious.
In their newest film, “For Your Consideration,” written by Mr. Guest and Eugene Levy and performed in a broader than usual version of the company’s semi-improvisatory style, some of the most delirious mischief is concentrated in scenes from a ridiculous imaginary movie, “Home for Purim.”
Contrary to every law of nature, principle of arts criticism or movie-industry business model, this piece of celluloid schlock accumulates awards buzz after a visitor to the set posts a notice on the Internet citing the “Oscar-worthy” performance of one of its stars, Marilyn Hack (Catherine O’Hara). Faster than a mouse click, an epidemic of Oscar fever grips the set, and as the hype escalates, other cast members’ names come into play.
A creaky Southern melodrama with a Jewish twist, “Home for Purim” is performed in a florid, old-fashioned style with accents as thick as lumps of congealed molasses. The word “Mama” is shrieked in the caterwauling tones of “Mama’s Family,” that long-running, hilariously misanthropic spinoff from “The Carol Burnett Show.” In fact, the jolly ensemble style of Mr. Guest’s company owes a great deal to the skits cooked up in the 1970s by Ms. Burnett, Harvey Korman and the show’s writing team.
The Mama in this case is a dying matriarch who, in Ms. O’Hara’s inspired hands, emerges as a sly takeoff on Geraldine Page in her grandly aggrieved Southern mode. As the actor playing Mama’s husband — a performer best known for TV commercials in which he plays Irv the Foot-Long Weiner — Harry Shearer wears a Zachary Scott mustache and flashes buck teeth.
Domestic fireworks explode when the movie couple’s prodigal daughter Rachel takes home a lesbian lover for the Jewish holiday. Callie Webb (Parker Posey), the actress who plays Rachel, is best-known for her one-woman performance piece, “No Penis Intended,” and late in the movie we see a smidgen of this Off Off Broadway atrocity.
“Home for Purim” suggests a hybrid of “The Little Foxes” and “The Children’s Hour,” mixed with a cheesy Tennessee Williams knockoff and garnished with “Fiddler on the Roof.” It’s Jewish Southern Gothic with a sour cream filling and a weepy, sugary topping of David O. Selznick.
Alas, only bits and pieces of “Home for Purim” are shown in “For Your Consideration.” As the pre-Oscar hype snowballs into an avalanche, Martin Gibb (Ricky Gervais), who runs the distribution company Sunfish Classics, demands that the film’s Jewishness be “toned down,” and its title is changed to “Home for Thanksgiving.” We see nothing of the final product.
“For Your Consideration” is by far the broadest comedy Mr. Guest and company have made. Despite its merriment, it is also the flimsiest. Unlike Mr. Guest’s earlier films, the movie has no airs of being a fake documentary. As farce trumps satire, the humor’s subversive edge is lost, along with meaningful character development, with the brilliant exception of Ms. O’Hara’s Marilyn.
Her inspired comic creation belongs on the same shelf as the provincials in Mr. Guest’s “Waiting for Guffman,” who dream that their little amateur show might be Broadway bound, and the aging folk singers of “A Mighty Wind,” who still nurture a sanctimonious image of themselves as a cultural vanguard. Mr. Guest’s vision of naïve American dreamers acting out their fantasies found its deepest expression in the dog owners of “Best in Show,” whose primped-up pets on parade were manifestations of their vanity. Those dog owners also represented a wide cross-section of Americans, something that “For Your Consideration” doesn’t begin to evoke.
In “For Your Consideration,” satire only glancingly collides with reality. To begin with, a movie like “Home for Purim” would never be made, even in the outermost reaches of independent cinema. Nor would a unit publicist be as clueless and buffoonish as the one played here by John Michael Higgins, who refers to “the World Wide Inter-Web” and delivers this zany analysis of the acting profession: “Inside every actor is a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale, and you never know which will show up.”
Funny? Yes. Revealing? No. By and large, the movie is content to offer amusing caricatures and leave it at that.
And so we are left to enjoy clever spoofs of media types who are already self-parodies. Leading the list is an obsequious television couple, played by Fred Willard in a red Mohawk and a wonderfully deadpan Jane Lynch, who host an “Entertainment Tonight”/“Access Hollywood”-like program, and Don Lake and Michael Hitchcock as dueling movie critics many notches in insight below Ebert and Roeper.
This is the first Christopher Guest film in which too many characters are spread too thinly. The beleaguered screenwriters (Bob Balaban and Michael McKean), whose ideas go unheard, barely have time to register. Even the appearances of Mr. Guest (with frizzy mad scientist hair), as the autocratic director of “Home for Purim,” and Mr. Levy, as a feckless agent, are too hasty.
That leaves us with Ms. O’Hara, whose Marilyn, a virtual unknown after nearly 30 years in show business, initially feigns nonchalance about the buzz. As she makes the rounds of talk shows, stroked and goaded by one talking head after another, you observe her seduction by the insatiable monster of television celebrity journalism. In her final act of obeisance to the system, she appears, drastically made over and destroyed, her lips plumped, her face stretched into an expressionless mask of desperate ambition.
“For Your Consideration” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has strong language.
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
Opens today in New York;Los Angeles; Boston and Cambridge, Mass.; Chicago; Dallas; Minneapolis; Portland, Ore.; Seattle and San Francisco.
Directed by Christopher Guest; written by Mr. Guest and Eugene Levy; director of photography, Roberto Schaefer; edited by Robert Leighton; music by C J Vanston; production designer, Joseph T. Garrity; produced by Karen Murphy; released by Warner Independent Pictures. Running time: 86 minutes.
WITH: Bob Balaban (Philip Koontz), Jennifer Coolidge (Whitney Taylor Brown), Christopher Guest (Jay Berman), John Michael Higgins (Corey Taft), Eugene Levy (Morley Orfkin), Jane Lynch (Cindy), Michael McKean (Lane Iverson), Catherine O’Hara (Marilyn Hack), Parker Posey (Callie Webb), Harry Shearer (Victor Allan Miller), Fred Willard (Chuck) and Ricky Gervais (Martin Gibb).
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