If you remember (or have rented) Rob Reiner’s 1984 masterpiece of a music “mockumentary” written by Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, you probably remember an intensely funny, wildly inventive and endlessly amusing film that follows a “fictional” heavy metal band on tour. You also remember a young Fran Drescher as Bobbi Flekman, whose hysterical performance as a publicist matches the level of those delivered by Guest and Company. You probably remember, too, the unforgettable line (one of many):”This one goes to eleven…” But I won’t explain it; just find it and watch it as November slips away.
You will be struck by its imagination and guts and the fact that director Reiner and actors/writers Guest, McKean and Shearer wrote the music for Spinal Tap, the heavy metal band that is at the center of this great satire.
Flash forward twenty-two years. “For Your Consideration,” Guest’s latest, flawed but valiant and ultimately, angry and sad effort, opened last weekend. I saw it with some friends, my kids and theirs, in a crowded movie theatre on the upper West Side: the demographics reflected the neighborhood-- affluent, intelligent, ultra-liberal and from the nervous laughter, largely Jewish.
Though it deviated from the Guest “mockumentary” formula seen in “Spinal Tap,” “A Mighty Wind”, and possibly his best film, “Waiting for Guffman,” among many others, “For Your Consideration” was pure Christopher Guest. And of course it was littered with a group of enormously talented actors who by now, can be considered his posse of usual suspects, : Catherine O’Hara, Harry Shearer, Eugene Levy, Michael McKean, Bob Balaban, Ed Begley, Jr. and Parker Posey, among many – unafraid to push the envelope, especially when it comes to the topic to which “For Your Consideration” refers: the Academy Awards. When studios want certain movies or actors to be nominated, they campaign their “candidates” all over Hollywood – on billboards, in trade papers, through direct mail, I’m imagining(!) Exploring the ribbons of emotion and motion the reality of an Oscar nomination sets in motion -- or, more intrinsic to the plot here – what the “possibility” of being “nominated” means to an actor, producer and a studio…this thick soup of a movie looks at the power of hype and the questions of self-worth at the very heart of Hollywood – and the plot of this sometimes funny, ultimately bitter film that is about “Home for Purim”, making this a “film-within-a-film”.
The story: Hollywood “buzz” creates a “word-of-mouth” will-she/won’t-she get the nomination campaign when a low-rent publicist who had no idea what the “World Wide Net” was…began a rumor based on a blogger’s mention of Catherine O’Hara’s over-the-top performance in the corny, goofy story of a Jewish family in the South. Catherine O’Hara and Harry Shearer play the leads in “Home for Purim” and to get guaranteed, knee-jerk laughs, I suppose, Guest fills the script and everything surrounding “the Purim movie” with Yiddish words and phrases. It’s like the “Borscht Belt” suddenly went younger. And to the Left Coast.
The goofy premise of the movie, that the weak and fading Esther Pisher, Catherine O’Hara’s character in “Home for Purim” portrayed by the film character of uber-disappointed Marilyn Hack, is dying…and she waits, on the edge of death, for her beloved daughter Rachel, played to perfection by Parker Posey, to come “Home for Purim” before she can slip away. O’Hara is brilliant as Hack playing Pisher; her melodrama is kept in check. Harry Shearer is equally moving as the sad-sack Victor Allen Miller, a true has-been in every sense of the word. In fact, all the performances are classic Guest satire: taking ordinary lives and allowing us to watch them blown up for us, making them larger-than-life, making us care about the minute details that characterize and stereotype them so perfectly, zooming in on their flaws and enlarging them until we almost cringe.
Had Guest turned down the volume on the relentless Jewish references, cut down the sheer splatter of words, and not turned the characters on themselves, betraying themselves so profoundly that all we are left with are shells of former, more promising lives, this film would not have taken such an achy, sorrowful turn. The denouement was painful and after it occurred, there was nothing left but a (thankfully) short and awkward downward slide as we see the actors months after the Oscar nominations have come and gone. Even though Parker Posey’s fully screamed-out performance art piece, “No Penis Intended” could not have been better delivered by her or any other actress I can imagine, I cannot imagine where this film was going to end up, once it ran out of Jewish one-liners. Still, the publicity blitz the film gets…Harry Shearer’s character on an MTV-type show, “Chillaxin” and Bob Balaban and Michael McKean trying to get a word in edgewise on a “Charlie Rose” clone are what Guest and Company do best: capture an attitude, a mood, a scene from American life with great guts, nerve and somehow hand to back to us with enormous subtlety.
For that very compelling reason, and to couch “For Your Consideration” in the context of Guest’s complete works, this may be a movie very much worth your consideration…and if you haven’t seen them, rent “This Is Spinal Tap” and “Waiting For Guffman”. Well worth your time and consideration.
