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FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
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An undercurrent of bitterness runs through For Your Consideration, director Christopher Guest's latest ensemble mockumentary. The C-list actors who comprise the cast of in-production Home for Purim, consoling themselves with desperate fables about their disdain for awards, are successively thrown into fantasy kvelling by the news that, somewhere on the World Wide Interweb ("that's the email thing, right?" as the publicist asks), there is a suggestion that Marilyn Hack's (Catherine O'Hara, Home Alone) not-yet-finished performance as the dying mother Esther in this verklempt weeper is potentially worthy of a -- dare I say it? -- Oscar nomination.
Soon the fever has swept the whole cast, Esther's baritone pipe-smoking husband Victor Allan Miller (Derek Smalls from Spinal Tap), best known as Irv the Foot-Long Weiner, and Callie Webb (indy queen Parker Posey, The Daytrippers) playing their estranged lesbian daughter Rachel, both of whom also are whispered to be -- dare I say it? -- also possibly tipped for Oscar nods.
Even though his ensemble cast keeps growing, adding smarmy Ricky Gervais (The Office) and smug Larry Miller (Ten Things I hate About You), Guest's movies are becoming more recursive, as the Guest Rep players all return, each manifesting a new quirky personality: John Michael Higgins as publicist Corey Taft ("don't make assumptions about the talent, don't assume the talent can hear well"), grouper-lipped Jennifer Coolidge as airhead producer Whitney Taylor Brown ("we had a diaper company, the Brown Diaper Company"), Bob Balaban (2010) and Michael McKean (David St. Hubbins) as the playwrights venturing into films ("You can't throw the baby out with the bathwater, because then all you have is a wet, critically injured baby"), all orchestrated by director Guest (Nigel Tufnel), playing director Jay Berman (and channeling a graying Art Garfunkel in the process) with a tone-perfect Noo Yawk accent.
Unlike Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind, all of which were converging independent stories that culminated in a single staged event (think Bridge of San Luis Rey out of Airport), For Your Consideration represents an advance in Guest's oeuvre for it has a distinct temporal arc. This allows the characters to evolve, and some of them actually do. The gilded-statue catnip intoxicates them all, and while it exposes their sympathetic aspirations, it also reveals their shallowness, although mostly in self-contained little skits. Guest's directorial technique of encouraging his actors to work in small groups developing their characters, which served him well in ensemble-finale stories (as in Guffman, Show, and Wind), fails here as the skits neither sprint nor build.
Though peppered with individual jokes and witticisms ("could you tone down the Jewishness?"), For Your Consideration is a gloomy, even mean-spirited film. Hollywood Now co-host Chuck Porter (Fred Willard, Fernwood 2Night) has a little too much spiteful fun ambush-interviewing the un-nominated the morning after -- "keep chuggin' along, no matter what the critics say," he exhorts Victor Allan Miller. Guest, who's obviously himself a fascinating fellow (son of a British baron, married for over twenty years to Jamie Lee Curtis), has long despised the film industry (witness his much sharper, much subtler script and 1989 film The Big Picture). Here his anger emerges in his directorial enabling for inter-character cruelty. "You're the backbone of the industry," Chuck Porter gushes when Victor Allan Miller's star is rising. "In a town famous for no backbone," growls Miller harshly, in a voice that pierces his character's mask.
Comedians in youth age into dramatists (Woody Allen, Steve Martin) and though Guest is a late bloomer, For Your Consideration is a nevertheless transitional film. Comedically, it's well below Guest's best (Spinal Tap, actually directed by Rob Reiner, followed by A Mighty Wind and Best in Show), and dramatically it is uneven and uncertain that it is ready to be a drama. A pity, as O'Hara in particular stretches herself (in many senses) in a performance that might be worthy of -- dare I say it? -- an Oscar nomination.