Christopher Guest (2006)
Christopher Guest’s reputation as a pioneer figure in the mockumentary genre is unchallengeable: he wrote and acted in This is Spinal Tap and has directed well-received films like A Mighty Wind (about a folk music reunion event) and Best in Show (a dog show). We gave up on This is Spinal Tap after half an hour; we managed even less of A Mighty Wind, even though that had twenty years’ less excuse for seeming primitive. For Your Consideration isn’t exactly a mockumentary but it is a lampoon of the inside world of another branch of entertainment. It’s about the making of a picture, a low-budget Jewish family melodrama set in the American South. There are no stars in the cast of ‘Home for Purim’ but rumours get started that one then another of its actors is a dark horse for an Oscar nomination. The Hollywood awards industry might seem almost too easy a target but there should still be rich pickings for any satirist worth their salt. But For Your Consideration is tediously crude – in the way that made Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind, for me, unwatchable. I think the only reason I watched this one all the way through was because its subject was impregnably appealing.
The film is bad because the script is bad – and certainly doesn’t meld with the largely hyper-realistic style of performance. If the dialogue was mainly improvised by the actors (as is claimed on Wikipedia – although the screenplay credit goes just to Guest and Eugene Levy) they must all have been unsuccessful gag writers in a past life. The lines don’t even sound as if they might have been improvised originally but too much worked over by the time the film was shot. The script is never able to go for more than a couple of exchanges without a punchline and it’s rarely a good one. The pattern of the writing is established right from the start. As aging, careworn actress Marilyn Hack drives into the film studios, the man at the gate asks if he knows her face from a particular film. When she says no, he tells her where he recognises her from, and, when she denies it, goes into a little routine, ‘You weren’t in that movie? You sure you weren’t in that movie? You should have been in that movie. That was a good movie’.
Marilyn, who plays the dying matriarch in ‘Home for Purim’, is the first of the cast to be whispered for an Oscar nomination. Then it’s the turn of another veteran, Victor Allan Miller, a public face through his enduring career in frankfurter commercials; then the young Callie Webb, whose background is in failed feminist stand-up comedy. The only person who doesn’t get a whisper is Brian Chubb, Callie’s boyfriend until, stressed by the prospect of a nomination, she dumps him for not being ‘supportive’. On the day the Oscar nominations are announced, the embittered Brian doesn‘t want to know about them and determinedly sleeps in. He’s the only one nominated (for Best Supporting Actor, obviously). It’s typical of For Your Consideration’s laziness that there’s absolutely no follow-up to this. Brian’s nomination is the punchline – we never see him again, let alone find out how the news affected him or his relationship with Callie (or if he won). This is in spite of the fact that we’re given contemptuous, completely unsurprising back-to-real-life-after-the-moment-of-fame updates on Marilyn, Victor and Callie.
When Marilyn, suddenly replete with breast implants and facial cosmetic surgery, goes on the talk show circuit to campaign for the newly-renamed ‘Home for Thanksgiving’, she reminds the TV audience that Thanksgiving is ‘not only non-denominational but the start of the awards season’, a remark which exposes FYC’s concentration on the Oscars to the exclusion of all other film prizes. The breathless succession of nomination and award announcements from late November through to the Oscars in (currently) mid-February could have supplied some kind of comic spine to the film. The proliferation of awards is a big part of what makes them ridiculous. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the scene knows that the Oscar nominations are preceded by the Golden Globe nominations, and that regional critics’ circle prizes emerge on a nearly daily basis from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Guest doesn’t make use of this because he’s not actually interested in satirising the awards industry. FYC is laughing more at the egos and the brittle vanity of actors, a theme which isn’t sufficiently new or distinctive to support an entire picture.
It’s no surprise, then, that ‘Home for Purim/Thanksgiving’ is far too crap for any self-respecting awards aficionado to condescend to give it a second thought. In this respect too, the joke seems to be less on Hollywood than on the hopeless self-delusion of the company of losers involved in the making of the film. Guest and Levy could have been more daring and politically incorrect about the kind of sleeper picture that regularly springs into contention at awards time. Seeing The Soloist the following night made me all the more aware of how anachronistic FYC‘s ideas were of what the industry might go for. The Soloist does have stars (and it’s probably too lethargic actually to get awards nominations) but, as a prescription for Academy Awards consideration, it’s a credible satirical notion for twenty-first century Hollywood: black, mentally ill, artistic-genius performer meets hard-bitten journalist who has never learned how to love. And it’s Based On A True Story. ‘Home for Purim’, with its archaic melodramatic acting and situations, might have worked better if Guest and Levy had had one of the people behind it realise the film was so bad that its naffness could be its commercial salvation – with an audience different from the one for which it had been originally designed. (Even then it wouldn’t have been likely to get awards buzz – but Guest and Levy might have made that happen as a result of the expected contenders all turning out to be so boringly worthy that they died at the box office.) I expect plenty of people are happy to enjoy FYC at this dumb level and that they’d see the criticisms I’m making as ‘taking things too seriously’ – but I bet plenty of the same people will also be ready to applaud the film as a razor-shape exposé of the movie industry. Guest and Levy make no effort to try to suggest why film producers and agents might be seen as ridiculous. They rely on really hopeless jokes to make people look silly: for example, virtually no one involved in ‘Home for Purim’, behind or in front of the camera, is able to use the internet. In 2006.
There are plenty of evidently talented people in the cast, including Catherine O’Hara (who actually won the National Board of Review Best Supporting Actress award for her performance as Marilyn), Harry Shearer (Victor), Parker Posey (Callie), Christopher Moynihan (Brian) and, in smaller parts, Bob Balaban, Ed Begley Jr and Sandra Oh. Guest himself plays the director of ‘Home for Purim’ and Levy an agent. At one point Ricky Gervais turns up as a studio executive (it’s he who gets the film’s title changed so that it’s not ‘too Jewish’). Gervais is a very limited performer but his presence here reminds you how sophisticated The Office was compared with the mockumentaries with which Christopher Guest is associated (although I’ve not seen Best in Show). Gervais’s Extras was also much more sympathetic than For Your Consideration is to the desperate ambitions of actors and writers.
7 October 2009
