Review of For Your Consideration (2006) by Markbayer — 11 Jan 2007

The latest in director Christopher Guest's trademark series of satiric miniatures of groups on the fringe of show business (community theater, dog competitions, folksinging groups), written by Guest and Eugene Levy and featuring a more or less ongoing repertory cast including but not limited to Guest, Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Fred Willard, Harry Shearer, Michael McKean and Parker Posey moves to the center of the showbiz spectrum and in doing so eschews some of the gentleness that Guest's films are normally known for--it really draws blood! The cast of a nice little independent movie, Home for Purim, catches wind of possible "Oscar buzz" for some of their performances (before the film is even in the can); the Academy bug bites them, they hit the campaign trail, and the results aren't pretty.

They're occasionally not funny either, and to a degree I think that's intentional; Guest and Levy seamlessly incorporated pathos to their palette last time around in A Mighty Wind, in telling the story of divorced folkie duo Mitch and Mickey and the former's bouts with schizophrenia.

..and in For Your Consideration they add real anger. Their jabs at Entertainment Tonight, local and national talk shows and Ebert and Roeper wannabes is typically spot-on, and I especially relished their take on the "Weinsteinization" of indie filmmaking as the movie-within-a-movie's producers strongly encourage its makers to divest their work of certain elements that make it independent to begin with in order to increase its chances with Oscar voters and the public.

(Fat chances they are, too; all this jockeying comes off as especially futile when you realize that the fictional Home for Purim or whatever it's calling itself this week for what it is--a well-intentioned chore to sit through that won't even reach the Top 40 in sales or rentals the first week it's released to DVD.

) It's also notable that Willard's entertainment-news interviewer is a spiritual distant cousin of his gauche sportscaster in over his head in Best in Show, but while his character in that film was almost lovable, his antics here are so genuinely callous and loathsome that at certain points they even outrage his only slightly more ethical partner (Jane Lynch) almost as much as they do the audience! In one of those ironic cases of life imitating art a little more closely than anyone really wants, O'Hara memorably plays the unfortunately and inaccurately named Marilyn Hack, a shy actress who's especially affected and compromised by the Oscar campaigning game.

..and is receiving a lot of real-life Oscar talk for portraying her! (For hers, God's, and everyone else's sake, let's hope O'Hara is personally navigating this a lot better than her character does!) As certain reviewers and posters have already noted, For Your Consideration is slightly lighter on consistent belly laughs than most of Guest's other work (although this still places it considerably ahead of 85% of any other comedies currently playing or that randomly come to mind), and at times its observations on the publicity process and the cost it demands on those involved cut so deep that it's too painful to actually enjoy.

But watching Guest's and Levy's normally benign, rather sweet-natured mini-genre actually snarl in rage for the first time is an event well worth watching...and so is a film about Hollywood that, at least in terms of its deeply cynical but sharply observed and highly accurate attitude toward it, can be comfortably mentioned in the same breath as Sunset Boulevard and The Player.