For Your Consideration

For Your Consideration. Directed by Christopher Guest (also written by Christopher Guest annnnnnnnnd—according to the credits—scored by Christopher Guest. Starring Christopher Guest, Fred Willard (went to VMI, so the story goes), Katherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Robert Balaban, Michael McKean, Larry Miller, Ed Begley, Jr., the usual suspects.

The usual suspects. And the usual sustenance. If you like Christopher Guest, you won’t be… actually you just may be disappointed. He’s done great stuff dissecting the petty vanities of God’s lesser creatures (namely, us boneheads still floundering toward that “upper station of lower life” Robinson Crusoe’s dad told him to aim for), their futile hopes, their obstinate delusions, their occasional cruelty, their inexplicable yet glorious resilience in the face of the kind of cataclysm that can loom large in a small life: Best in Show (my dog didn’t win), A Mighty Wind (my career’s over), Waiting for Guffman (I’m smalltime and always will be). This outing (in several senses that word), though, he’s tackled the big time—a parody, indictment, inculpation of Hollywood in all its boorish, tacky imbecility—and that’s a topic already addressed by some heavy hitters (and some heavy budgets) like Robert Altman of sacred memory (The Player, Nashville … okay, okay music), Mel Brooks (The Producers now in its umpteenth avatar… okay, okay Broadway and no, I dunno what the flock an “avatar” is), Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard: “I’m ready for my close-up now, Mr. De Mille…”), Sydney Lumet (Paddy Chayefsky’s Network… okay, okay teevee) and on and on annnnnnnnd… an adversary so slab-sided and obtuse, so thick-skinned and up-armored, so self-absorbed and impervious to penetration by any means, that subtlety can be wasted, ricochet, roll off that rhinoceros hide like.. um, er virtue off a coed’s jeans.

I gather that the phrase “For your consideration…” belongs somehow to the business of poking this season’s celluloid moments in the face of members of the Academy that hands out the Academy Awards ™, called also Oscar ™ and trademarked as proof of real class (the Melville estate, for instance, gets 17 cents every time somebody mentions Moby Dick ™ …ka-ching!). In this case, it’s the performances of four principals (fewer principles, though) in a small-scale production of a syrupy melodrama fetching titled “Home for Purim,” the Jewish holiday by which we celebrate the hanging of Haman (you can look it up… in the Old Testament, I’m thinking but check the index). It’s a downhome story set in the forties and replete with benign Dad sporting a cardigan, Mom upstairs in the Victorian happily and anything but quietly dying of some vague but not disfiguresome disease, dumbo son back on leave in his sailor suit but ready to “take on those Japs.” They’re all waiting for the prodigal sister to come home to be at Mom’s bedside but soon enough have cause to regret her return when she shows up with her butch lover, Tiffany (or something). Horror etched on Middle American (except they’re Jewish) faces. Will Mom reconcile with the truant? Will Tiffany sit at table with the Norma Rockwells (except they’re Jewish)? Will Mom check out blessed and quiesced? The whole thing is larded with New York Yiddish, which we sorta halfway get (“It’s making me meshuggena,” wheezes Mom) and sorta halfway find funny out in Amana or Des Plaines. The gags that turn on Purim (the celebration), nevertheless, are kinda Judeo-specific arcane hunh?, so it’s as much a blessing as a joke when dumbo suits from “the Studio” show up (Larry Miller one of them, flying the world’s worst toupee) to “play down the Jewishness” and change the holiday to Thanksgiving, a “more elegant holiday,” as they decide (at least nobody got hanged at Plymouth… unless you count that Thomas Granger guy… annnnnnnd his turkey: you can look it up. Gobble! Gobble!)

To this cast of newbies and burnouts, then, the news that somebody has been bruited as candidate for an Oscar ™ comes as electrification. While subtle changes overcome the potentials (first the mom, Marilyn Hack, played heartbreakingly by O’Hara; then the dad, who moonlights as a “foot long wiener”; then the ingénue—variously pronounced and nobody knows for sure just where to put that accent thingie—who promptly dumps her boyfriend over it on account of non-supportivitivty), the rumor feeds itself and the entertainment news apparatus lumbers into action, notably an Entertainment Tonight ™ knockoff, featuring Fred Willard’s now-familiar Century-21 blazered, funny hairdone, media lout (yuckable, but hardly an exaggeration: go punch that remote…). This one sheds the documentary formula of Guest’s earlier movies but still manages to reprise the technique with imbedded interviews, film clips, play-within-play and so on. We follow the cast through the achingly-mediocre script (hovered over with rising alarm by the two writers—McKean and Balaban—as they watch their encomium to a little known sectarian ritual decay into ecumenism, that is: mush) interpreted by a frizzy-haired (and frizzy-witted) director (Guest) while whispers of Academy Award ™ caliber performances, planted by hanger-on figures like agent Eugene Levy (shown in one clumsy scene noshing on a schmeer, in case you had any doubt about his ethnicity, you dummie) grow into murmurs then acclamations… all before the fact. Jealousy. Vanity. Desperation. Then, we know, eventual and fierce disappointment for someone.

Comes now the momento de la verdad (Spanish for “You can see her butt right through that dress!”), Oscar ™ night. Cleverly, we don’t witness the announcements, only see backlit as it were the aftermath: resignation, bitterness, dementia. Who does snag the prize? And what becomes of those of us who come thaaaaaaaaat close but miss the brass ring? Would we have been happier never to have been nominated and thus never elevated, never fall? I wish I could say this flick is as good as Guest’s others, of which I think Guffman the one see, but he’s kinda gone to the well one time too many, altered the formula but not enough. For one thing, there’s already plenty of corrosive vanity, futile hope, crushing disappointment, black-edged despair out here among us soaring squirrels (homo sapiens in Latin: homo, squirrel; sapiens, flying …oh, yeah, and what’ve you got, exactly, when you’ve added wings to a squirrel?). Don’t really need that stuff mirrored or magnified, seems to me.

For a comedy, announced as a comedy, peddled as comedy, preceded by a string of film comedy from the same bunch of actors, writers, director this thing compels surprisingly a sense of real pain over the washouts and wannabes who kinda remind us of …us: mostly decent, mostly competent, now and again soaring to real achievement, but mostly doomed to keep doing mostly what and mostly how we’re doing this moment. Sorry.