This may be the most developed of Christopher Guest’s projects, and – with its quiet humor – one of the most satisfying.
By: Bob Brown
The dreaded "Oscar buzz" can mess up any actor’s work in an otherwise respectable career. Writer/actor Eugene Levy knows only too well. When his name was bandied about as Best Supporting Actor for A Mighty Wind in 2003, Levy recalls, "It was shocking." He comments in production notes for this film, "Once it’s in your head, no matter how you shake it, you can’t get it out. You try and talk yourself out of it, but it’s still there, and if somebody else mentions it: doubly hard to get out of your head."
Jumping off from this common Hollywood phenomenon, Levy and co-writer/director Christopher Guest came up with this insiders’ look at the curse of the impossible dream. It’s another in Guest’s series of tales about the presumption of greatness, like This Is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show.
Unlike its predecessors, however, which have helped to shape the so-called "mockumentary," For Your Consideration is a straight shot no documentary filmmakers and faux on-camera interviews. In fact, this movie may be the most developed of Guest’s projects, which usually involve only the barest of outlines and a lot of on-camera ad-libbing by his very talented ensemble casts.
The reason for the added structure? This movie is about the making of a modest independent film, Home for Purim, which is a period piece in the style of 1940s tear-jerkers. Convincing sets and costuming for the film within a film were required. And the acting style of Home for Purim had to be exaggerated in an authentic way that contrasted with the less exaggerated characterizations of the actors when they were "out of character."
It’s quite a balancing act. But Guest’s ensemble is up to the task. The result is one of the most satisfying Guest films. Granted, this is a quiet humor that comes with a wink and a nod rather than a broad guffaw. It has to grow from within.
Director Guest also plays Jay Berman, a sitcom veteran directing Home for Purim as his first feature film. (This director within the director sometimes confused the real cast, who could never tell when Guest was being himself or Berman.) Berman likes to play loose with the script (who does that sound like?), a creative freedom that annoys Philip Koontz (Bob Balaban) and Lane Iverson (Michael McKean), co-writers of the play on which Home for Purim is based. They’re further infuriated when Martin Gibb (Ricky Gervais), president of Sunfish Classics, which is financing the movie, declares that the Jewishness needs to be "toned down."
But the essence of Berman’s movie is, of course, its Jewishness, about a family from the deep South whose world is collapsing even as the joy of Purim descends upon them. This holiday, the terminally ill Momma Pischer (Catherine O’Hara as Marilyn Hack) yearns to see her estranged daughter Rachel (Parker Posey as Callie Webb, a failed comedy actress). When Rachel finally arrives, she has in tow her "special friend," Mary Pat (Rachael Harris as Debbie Gilchrist, a severe Czech-trained method actress). Presiding over the dinner table is Poppa Pischer (Harry Shearer as Victor Allan Miller, a two-bit actor trying to outgrow his typecasting as Felber’s Kosher Hot Dogs spokesman, Irv the Footlong Weiner).
On the Purim set, Oscar buzz bubbles up from nowhere when publicist Corey Taft (John Michael Higgins) spreads a rumor that Marilyn is being touted on the "Inter-Web" as a possible Academy Award nominee. Like a virus, Oscar buzz begins to anoint everyone in the cast, all except for Brian Chubb (Christopher Moynihan), Callie’s boyfriend and Purim co-star as her brother, Sam.
The buzz begins to infect TV’s gossip shows, movie-review shows and talk shows. This allows for bull’s-eye parodies such as Hollywood Now (Entertainment Tonight), Love It/Hate It (Ebert & Roeper), The Round Table (Charlie Rose), and more. The buildup is such a snowball that inter-cast jealousies develop, and hypocritical denials that winning an Oscar means anything.
The cast of dozens includes Guest’s reliable regulars, who know how to roll with the material, including Fred Willard as Hollywood Tonight’s smarmy host and Hollywood pest, and Jennifer Coolidge as bleach-blonde Whitney Taylor Brown, heiress to the Brown Diaper Company fortune, who bought rights to Koontz and Iverson’s play (she mispronounces Koontz and has to be corrected).
There have been other comedies about filmmaking and the puffed-egos of filmmakers: the late Robert Altman’s The Player, Steve Martin’s Bowfinger, Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, to name just a few. Christopher Guest flies in the face of these by treating the industry with affection even while he’s skewering its pretension and its position as the premier manufacturer of dashed hopes. What the movie has in the end is poignancy. And Catherine O’Hara’s double performances are so good, she might even be nominated for an Oscar. But I don’t want to start any rumors.
Rated PG-13 for sexual references and brief language.

