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A MIGHTY WIND
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On the back of the Director's Wheaties Box, there is a recipe for the Instant Movie. In a character mixing bowl – think airplane, ocean liner, political convention, dog show – sift a box of quirky characters. Either simmer them in a plot stew (LIFEBOAT, THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE) or microwave frame to the crisis and do interlocking flashbacks to bring them to that one spot.
Thus the original recipe, THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY, begat Robert Altman's NASHVILLE – the apotheosis of the sui generis actor-created story (Altman's cast mostly wrote their own C&W tunes) and its red-headed stepchild AIRPORT. In a fit of weakness, that begat AIRPLANE! … andthat, in turn, begat SPINAL TAP.
Which brings us to Christopher Guest, the Zelig of directors. Like Fisher Stevens, Tracey Ullman, and their mutual inspiration Peter Sellers, Guest can subsume himself in a character, disappearing into the role (did you spot him in A FEW GOOD MEN? or THE PRINCESS BRIDE?) so that it is only with a rueful surprised headshake that you recognize his name in the credits. And his very chameleon personality make him better as someone else's actor (Sellers with Stanley Kubrick in LOLITA and DR. STRANGELOVE, Guest with Rob Reiner in TAP); as his own director, he can be taken advantage of by coarser thespians (Fred Willard, anyone?) who mug, shout, and chew the furniture for lookit-me-ma! screen time.
Which, in its way, is a pity, because Guest is such a fine subtle actor, yet as a substitute-teacher director (you know, the earnest M. Ed. who lost control of the class in the first twenty seconds), he lets his actors walk all over the story. Guest sketched an overall story line leading to a celebratory reunion concert of the now-gray, now-paunchy, now-vacant Early Sixties Folkies, then flung his actors like so many jacks and let them develop their personalities and improvise their lines. The result is structurally as flabby as Guest's other films, BEST IN SHOW and WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, and by now the basic shticks have grown old. Further, because the script is improvised, we follow character silos – extended revelatory-funny monologs to the unseen interviewer, reunion groups whose members interact with one another in old, predictable Ralph-and-Alice Honeymooners ways. So Guest, Michael McKean (EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY), and Harry Shearer (THE RIGHT STUFF), reprise their airhead trio from Spinal Tap, only this time as this gray-bald Folksmen.
Guest co-wrote the story line with Eugene Levy (AMERICAN PIE), whose character, Mitch Cohen, is now a post-hallucinatory flower gnome (loosely coiffed on Arlo Guthrie) but was once half of Mitch and Mickey (Catherine O'Hara, HOME ALONE). These two actors have played together so long (since the original improvisational Second City TV 25+ years ago) that their scenes are almost not acting, but rather replaying the arcs of their own lives through the invented dialog between their characters – and, when Levy is not indulging his odd vocal cadences, sweetly bitter.
Individual moments scintillate, but the sole essence of comedy is surprise. That's all, just surprise, surprise and pace. Pace and surprise. The two chief essences of comedy are pace and surprise and sudden unpredictability. Amongst its essences are …
Comic bits are great but they work better when structured against a credible story arc. In this, NASHVILLE is exquisite – after meandering mumbled dialog, it all comes together in one wrenching crisis finale in which every single focus character plays a role that dramatically and poignantly expresses who he or she is, finishing with Barbara Harris's haunting rendition of, "It don't worry me."
SPINAL TAP, with Rob Reiner at the helm, traced multiple story lines. WIND, like SHOW, like GUFFMAN, has no more than one story strand – and nobody changes, an essential of drama.
Though the songs are great (I will want the soundtrack album so I can memorize the hysterical cloying lyrics) and funny in parts – we laughed out loud four different times – in total, A MIGHTY WIND is, regrettably, much less than the sum of its parts.