For Your Consideration

Christopher Guest directs For Your Consideration, his fourth mockumentary. The movie uses many of the same cast members from other Guest mockumentaries, including Fred Willard, Eugene Levy, Bob Balaban, Jennifer Coolidge, Michael McKean, and others. Along with those performers, For Your Consideration stars Catherine O’Hara, Harry Shearer, and Parker Posey. Ricky Gervais is also featured. The dialogue is largely improvised, but the style of the mockumentary somewhat differs from Guest’s earlier films.

O’Hara stars as the aptly named Marilyn Hack, an actress who is best known for her role as a blind prostitute in a film from the 80s. She’s been in the industry for 30 years now and is working on a new film called Home for Purim. Her co-star is Victor Allen Miller (Shearer), an acting veteran best known for being a hot dog mascot for a line of kosher frankfurters. The pair is cast as the mother and father of a Jewish family in the 1940s. Parker Posey is a newcomer to acting and plays the pair’s daughter, who is coming home along with her lesbian girlfriend (Rachael Harris) to surprise her family. Christopher Moynihan is Brian Chubb, who plays the son in the family.

As the filming of Home for Purim continues, Oscar buzz begins through an online rumours website and the cast begins to act accordingly. First, the buzz surrounds Hack. It spreads, however, through to Posey’s character and to veteran Miller, causing some hilarious results. Each performer begins to obsess about the possibility of winning the award. The studio execs butt in and decide that the film must be marketed to a higher audience because of all of this buzz, so some changes are made and the film is renamed to the less-Jewish Home for Thanksgiving. The changes to the actors and to the makers of the film are explored as the award announcements loom.

For Your Consideration works so well because it has natural flow and comic energy to it. The film is funny simply because it must be, as the actors and host of performers are inherently funny. The timing is always quick, the dialogue is witty and smart, and the construction of the piece is lovingly detailed. Guest’s films tend to focus on the idea of entertainment, with Best In Show focusing on a dog show and A Mighty Wind focusing on a folk music concert reunion. These aspects of entertainment, as explored by Guest, often hold hilarious connotations. The Oscar buzz internalized in For Your Consideration may be the biggest aspect Guest has played with to date, as its connotations are remarkably impactful.

Guest knows that there is no subject on earth riper for satire and laughter than that of human vanity. What people do when they think they are being rewarded or when they believe they are the recipient of some form of extreme accolade is worthy of exploration by anyone with a nose for humour. That vision of someone falling off of their high horse into a puddle of mud is one of the most classic visuals of egotism, especially in the hyperactive world of Hollywood filmmaking. This is where Guest’s film works so smartly.

Guest and his company of performers know that there are essential and absurd truths about Hollywood mythologizing. The marketing process for a film, for instance, takes place long before the film has even wrapped. The process to sell the film takes place throughout production and ventures through post-production and, often, beyond. This process effects how the performers work on the film and creates a host of buzz-related problems. Guest keys in on the egotism here and plays up the absurd truth behind the hyperbolic marketing of many films, which flows through internet rumour sites as we speak, to produce divine comedy.  The notion that “somebody out there likes me, they really like me” is often enough to fuel ludicrous behaviour in the right (or wrong) hands.

All of the characters required to complete this comedy cycle are here: Eugene Levy is the worthless agent, Jennifer Coolidge is the clueless producer, Ed Begley Jr. is the stylist, Bob Balaban and Michael McKean are the writers, Jane Lynch and Fred Willard host a sort of “Access Hollywood” knock-off, and Guest himself is the director of Home for Purim. Such a cast should be enough to produce some anticipatory laughter amongst lovers of improvisational comedy.

For Your Consideration is extremely funny, but it also has tinges of sadness and disappointment that help bring things full circle. All of Guest’s characters have dignity to some degree, although some have it in large quantities than others and, in some, self-centredness seems transposed on their most human of qualities to an excessive degree. Nevertheless, Guest’s crew has constructed a loving and hilarious nod to filmmaking that is just incredibly entertaining throughout.

Trailer: