Review of A Mighty Wind (2003) by Aaron K — 16 Jun 2012

Spinal Tap's Gentle Cousin.

I mean, how can you not make the reference? Apparently, the Folksmen opened for Spinal Tap once or twice, even. (And were booed by people who didn't realize who the Folksmen are. At least, you hope they didn't realize it; otherwise, that's odd.) Now, I have not yet gotten to [i]This Is Spinal Tap[/i], because it starts with "S" and I hadn't gotten around to it before starting the Giant Alphabet Movie Project. However, I prefer folk music to heavy metal, so I suspect this one will be more along my lines. In fact, while I would cheerfully throw the New Main Street Singers under a bus, I would listen to the Folksmen or Mitch and Mickey. And in fact, I know what the difference in quality is. I suspect this will be a problem when I do get to [i]Spinal Tap[/i]; while I can tell the difference between good and bad heavy metal, I'm not sure I know the difference between good and great heavy metal.

Irving Steinbloom (Stuart Luce) has died. In the folk heyday of the '50s and '60s, he was one of the most influential producers in the business. His three big discoveries were the Folksmen, the Main Street Singers, and Mitch and Mickey. Irving's son, Jonathan (Bob Balaban), gets together with his siblings (Don Lake and Deborah Theaker) to do a reunion concert of their father's biggest acts. The Folksmen are doing okay, but the Main Street Singers and Mitch and Mickey broke up ages ago. Original Main Street Singer George Menschell (Paul Dooley) has gotten together the New Main Street Singers; he is the only original member in the new one, though Sissy Knox (Parker Posey) was the daughter of another founding member. The group is now pretty much led by Terry (John Michael Higgins) and Laurie (Jane Lynch) Bohner. Mitch Cohen (Eugene Levy) and Mickey Crabbe (Catherine O'Hara) split up as an act when they split up personally, not least because one of their biggest hits was "The Kiss at the End of the Rainbow.".

Roger's complaint was that this wasn't biting enough, and that is actually true, I suppose. However, I don't know that it matters as much as all that. I like the sweeter, gentler tone of this movie. To me, it comes across not so much as satire as it does as elegy. Yes, okay, the New Main Street Singers are a bit satirical. There's the whole thing about how only one founding member is still in the group, and how he mostly seems to come across as a token just as much as the random Filipino guy (Mark Nonisa). And of course, they're also what it would look like if the Brady Bunch founded a folk group. There's also the fact that Christopher Guest as Alan Barrows has Peter Yarrow's hair and Harry Shearer as Mark Shubb has Paul Stookey's. But mostly, this seems to be about how time moves on for all of us, whether we want it to or not. Trying to revive the past doesn't work; really, you have to accept that and move on, though that doesn't mean you can't still do what you've always loved.

I suspect I also get a bit more of the satire than most people do. Folk singing was very much a white, middle-class phenomenon--leaving aside such outliers as Odetta and Woody Guthrie. For the most part, you got Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. (In fact, some real folk singers wanted to appear in the movie, but Christopher Guest thought it would take away from the satire.) The Civil Rights movement got a big boost from folk singers, who made it popular among young middle class white people, but of course there are no black performers here. One rather suspects, in fact, that the Main Street Singers, at least the new version, are kind of the Pat Boone of folk music--borrowing a lot from black musical tradition without acknowledging what they're doing. They are referred to at one point as a toothpaste commercial, and it's certainly true that there was a kind of popular folk group which took all the pain and grief out of folk and made it chipper.

This is one of the many, many movies which lost to the juggernaut that was [i]Lord of the Rings[/i]. While I actually prefer the songs Mitch and Mickey sing to that song from [i]LotR[/i], which in fact I didn't like at all, this was nominated in a bit of a ghetto category--Best Original Song, of course. (Side note--who knew that Eugene Levy had such a great singing voice?) I had hoped that the [i]LotR[/i] sweep would indicate that the Academy is finally trying to acknowledge more than just Important Dramas, but despite the fact that good satire is harder than good drama, good drama is seen somehow as more impressive. Now, Christopher Guest has pretty much locked himself up in that ghetto all by himself, and in a very small room of it at that. But there is real talent behind even such a mild satire as this, and that variety of talent never gets taken quite as seriously. Yes, this movie has its roots in a decades-old [i]SNL[/i] sketch. But isn't it still one of the best movies to have gotten its start on that show?