Short and smug

For Your Consideration

EVAN JOHNSON STAFF

Having had his way with dog-people (Best in Show), small-town theatre troupes (Waiting for Guffman), and aging, forgotten folk-music veterans (A Mighty Wind), director/mockumentarian Christopher Guest finally sets his sights on mocking Hollywood and its denizens in his latest film, For Your Consideration. Despite this large and deserving target, the result is Guest’s least convincing film yet, though fans of his (everybody but me?) will no doubt find much to enjoy.

The story, which is more compelling than that of previous Guest films, concerns the Oscar hype that accompanies a particularly awful and undeserving low-budget Jewish-themed period-piece drama called Home for Purim. After a series of Internet rumours peg three of the film’s performances as “Oscarworthy,” the Hollywood hypemachine kicks into high gear and the cast and filmmakers become embroiled in statueanticipation hoopla. (Did you know — the “Hollywood hype machine” is not an actual machine in the leversand- pulleys-and-sweaty-Russianguy- turning-heavy-cranks sense of the word, but rather a metaphor for the ways in which various Hollywood institutions and interests work together to achieve a desired result, namely, heightening local and national awareness of a particular film or performance?)

Guest assembles his usual sprawling and talented cast, and while it is fun, I admit, recognizing faces from his previous films, the sheer number of characters means that the film rarely spends enough time with any one character to achieve any kind of human depth or emotional resonance. Catherine O’Hara, playing veteran actress Marilyn Hack (rather cruel name, that), comes the closest; she plays her character with desperation and occasionally nuance, until the film sabotages her efforts by giving her an absurd and unfunny Botox-makeover.

Most of the rest of the cast either underperforms or is underused: Harry Shearer is, disappointingly, next to invisible as stage-to-screen actor Victor Allen Miller; Eugene Levy is genuinely boring and unoriginal as Miller’s bumbling agent, Morley Orfkin; Guest himself is merely passable as hack director Jay Berman.

The film is funniest when focusing on minor, tangential characters, which isn’t really a good sign. Fred Willard is his usual hilarious and unimpeachably buoyant self as Chuck Porter, co-host of an entertainment

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news show, and Jane Lynch is admirable and amusing as his partner; the brilliant Ricky Gervais is given little to do, though his smarmy grin is compelling as always; Don Lake and Michael Hitchcock, as a pair of film critics — one that loves everything he sees, one that hates everything he sees — on the show Love it/Hate it, use their natural features to great effect, though they’re given little to work with, which is disappointing, considering what assholes film critics are (ahem).

Technically speaking, For Your Consideration abandons the “mockumentary” approach taken by Guest’s previous three films (and the great This is Spinal Tap, in which he starred as Tap lead singer, Nigel Tufnel), though in practice the primary stylistic difference is that this film does not feature talkinghead style interviews interspersed throughout. This struck me, at first, as a welcome change of pace, as it was in those interviews in previous films that Guest’s characters seemed to be treated with the most lazy derision. The film soon bypasses this technicality, however, by continually having its characters interviewed on various television shows. The result is essentially sketch-comedy, though at least it provides some opportunity for some mild media satire.

I should stress that when I say above, “Christopher Guest’s least convincing film yet,” what I really mean is “Christopher Guest film I’ve seen most recently,” which is to say that the more exposure I have to his style, the more annoying it gets. The real problem is that Guest and his cast, however talented, tend to approach their characters with a rather satirically undesirable combination of contempt and lack of conviction.

Eugene Levy, who co-wrote the film with Guest, has said in interviews that he and Guest had a contest to see whose character could be the stupidest, and while I understand that casual comments made by Eugene Levy should not be exclusive grounds for dismissing entire films (let alone filmmakers), this comment seems indicative of the character depths gone unplumbed by these two venerable comedic talents. If you’re going to disrespect your own character, at least let that disrespect cut deep. Jesus Eugene, show us the ways in which your character’s stupidity is the stupidity in all of us. Or at the very least, hate yourself as much as your characters, like bonafide misanthrope Todd Solondz (Happiness, Welcome to the Dollhouse.) At least his films are disturbing; For Your Consideration is merely pleasant and totally forgettable.

For Your Consideration opens Nov. 17 in Winnipeg.