Review of For Your Consideration (2006) by Edith N — 04 Sep 2011

Funny Right Up Until It Gets Embarrassing.

For the curious, yes, it is entirely possible for a film to get Oscar buzz before it's actually finished. For example, there's any time Meryl Streep is in a new movie. The first I heard it suggested that she should be nominated for [i]Julie and Julia[/i] was while the movie was in production. I'm not sure any of Meryl's scenes had yet been filmed. And if you'd actually read the book, you would have assumed that she was only going to be eligible for Best Supporting Actress anyway--if you weren't busy being bewildered at the fact that anyone had needed to be cast in the role in the first place. And, yes, movies have ridiculous things changed in them; Terry Pratchett told the story of having a studio executive tell him how much they were looking forward to making a movie of his book [i]Mort[/i], and would he possibly be okay with cutting the character of Death? Who is, if you haven't read the book, kind of important to the story. And everyone involved in the business knows these things happen.

The film in question, later determined to be "too Jewish," is called [i]Home For Purim[/i]. It stars a cast of has-beens and never-weres; it's a low budget art movie of the kind which disappears from theatres after a week if they even make it that far. And some fan site on the internet somewhere declares that Marilyn Hack (Catherine O'Hara), who plays the dying matriarch of a Jewish family in the American South in the 1940s, might just be getting an Oscar nomination for the part. Since no one working for the studio seems to have the slightest idea how the internet works and that a single mention on a single blog somewhere doesn't actually count as buzz, they take it seriously, and the movie gets increasingly hyped, to the point where three of the five cast members are now mentioned as prospective nominees. Even though one of them, Victor Allan Miller (Harry Shearer), is best known for playing a foot-long hotdog on TV commercials.

I genuinely laughed out loud during parts of this movie. This may be my utter film geek nature surfacing, and I admit that, but at bare minimum, the film-within-a-film was hilarious. Just the sort of earnest, over-the-top stuff which generates a lot of Oscar buzz until people actually watch the thing. It probably also helped that I know what Purim is, which not even everyone involved in the making of the movie does. Which is probably why it gets changed midway through production to [i]Home For Thanksgiving[/i], which I have to tell you makes more sense anyway. I'll admit that I'm not all that deeply steeped in American Jewish culture, but I somehow doubt you can get leave from the Navy to go home for Purim, even if your mother is dying. Especially given that the movie is actually set during World War II. Which means the character wouldn't be able to get home for Thanksgiving even if his mother was dying, either, but never mind. That's half the fun.

Unfortunately, there is a lot less humour than movie. By the end of things, I was just kind of squirming and waiting for the movie to be over. Essentially, I am giving the first half an eight and the second a four, and it's averaging to six. Even in the beginning, there are some unnecessary awkward moments, and even at the end, there are a couple of amusing moments, but by and large, I don't think Christopher Guest (who himself plays Jay Berman, the director of [i]Home For Whatever[/i]) quite had an ending for this picture. To be fair, his films are only barely scripted, and I really don't think he could have stopped midway through when he discovered that large amounts of the movie weren't funny, but they weren't. The problem even seems to be with the bits Christopher Guest came up with; the whole thing is so ridiculously broad that it feels as though Eugene Levy and Fred Willard showed up on set and had no idea what to do with their characters in that situation.

Admittedly, there are quite a few things in this movie which aren't for everyone anyway. Christopher Guest's mockumentaries have a very specific sense of humour which doesn't work for everyone. It's also true that a lot of the jokes in this movie are industry specific. Yes, we've all seen actors go on TV shows which are diametrically opposed to the movies they are there to promote, shows where you can't imagine the hosts ever actually watching the movie in question. And we all know that movie posters can be misleading, but I'm not sure most people realize that they can be that way on purpose. That they know you won't care about the movie they've actually made and are trying to convince you that the movie is something completely other than what it is. It's just that the interaction between writer and director, cast and crew, filmmakers and studio, is a very specific one that I don't think the average viewer ever thinks about. Unfortunate, really, because a lot of that stuff is actually funny.