director
Christopher Guest
screenwriters
Christopher
Guest
Eugene Levy
producer
Donna E. Bloom
cinematographer
Arlene Donnelly Nelson
songs by
Christopher Guest
John Michael Higgins
Eugene Levy
Michael McKean
Catherine O'Hara
Annette O'Toole
Harry Shearer
Jeffrey C.J. Vanston
editor
Robert Leighton
cast
Bob Balaban (Jonathan Steinbloom)
Ed Begley Jr. (Lars Olfen)
Jennifer Coolidge (Amber Cole)
Paul Dooley (George Menschell)
Christopher Guest (Alan Barrows)
John Michael Higgins (Terry Bohner)
Michael Hitchcock (Lawrence E. Turpin)
Don Lake (Elliott Steinbloom)
Eugene Levy (Mitch Cohen)
Jane Lynch (Laurie Bohner)
Michael McKean (Jerry Palter)
Larry Miller (Wally Fenton)
Christopher Moynihan (Sean Halloran)
Catherine O'Hara (Mickey Crabbe)
Parker Posey (Sissy Knox)
Harry Shearer (Mark Shubb)
Deborah Theaker (Naomi Steinbloom)
Fred Willard (Mike LaFontaine)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 92m
u.s.
release: April 16,
2003
video
availability: TBA
official website
other christopher
guest films
reviewed on this website:
- almost
heroes
- best
in show
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Christopher Guest's great comic
theme is the self-delusion inherent in entertainment: it's always
seen as hapless competition, whether among film students (The
Big Picture), repertory players (Waiting for Guffman),
dog owners (Best
in Show), or one's own past glory (This Is Spinal
Tap). Guest's new mockumentary, A Mighty Wind, is,
like Spinal Tap, about aging musicians revisiting their
golden old days. The subject here is folk singers, though, not
pampered metal-rock dinosaurs, so A Mighty Wind is the
gentlest satire Guest has yet created. As Guest gets older, I
think, his instinct is to honor the entertainers who are still
in there pitching, rather than to tear them down.
Once again fashioning a loose
framework with co-star Eugene Levy (within which the cast is
free to improvise), Guest proposes that a trailblazing folk-music
manager has died, and that his son (Bob Balaban) wants to organize
a reunion concert of all the old '60s acts the old man represented.
There's the New Main Street Singers, who seem to have only one
original member left (a sour-faced Paul Pooley); the Folksmen,
a one-hit wonder reuniting the Spinal Tap group of Guest,
Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer; and Mitch and Mickey (Levy
and Catherine O'Hara), who once crooned sweetly to each other
to the oohs and ahs of America, but haven't spoken since their
acrimonious split decades ago.
As before, Guest lets the characters
talk at length, obliviously revealing their own quirks and neuroses.
The New Main Street Singers, for instance, seem to be a haven
for society's drop-outs, fleeing ugly reality and snuggling into
the safety and pieties of the group dynamic. One couple, the
waggishly named Bohners (John Michael Higgins and Jane Lynch),
talk like chipper suburban drones, but she has a past as a "performer"
in movies "for mature audiences," and they both solemnly
worship the "dimension of color." Parker Posey, with
bulletproof smile, appears as a younger group member who took
solace in the Main Street Singers after living on the streets
for a while. Folk music here is seen as a calming illusion, an
almost religious structure.
We watch the various groups
as showtime approaches. The Folksmen argue over whether to take
their old Dickies out of mothballs; Harry Shearer has the movie's
home-run line when he tries to distinguish between hip and retro.
The Main Street Singers, shiny and happy to a fault, nevertheless
show some integrity when deflecting the goofball ideas of Fred
Willard in the perfect Fred Willard role as their manager. The
emotional core of A Mighty Wind is the tentative reunion
of Mitch and Mickey, and Guest finds something real and spiky
in their anti-rapport. O'Hara gives a rather frightened performance
as a woman looking back on her past and seeing nothing but ghosts,
while Levy, the ghost who walks, goes so far into Mitch's near-autistic
misery that he creates a void that the movie is drawn into. It
throws the film's tender comedy off a little, but Guest and especially
Levy give us a man whose demons won't be resolved in a lifetime,
never mind in 92 minutes of screen time. The movie bravely lets
Mitch be screwed-up and unreachable, and the comedy deepens.
Everything leads up to the
live televised reunion concert, and Guest correctly concludes
that we don't want to see everything fall apart -- we don't want
any Stonehenge embarrassments, we want these people to come back
and bask in the glow again for an evening. Suspense gathers alongside
the comedy -- will Mitch get it together enough to perform again
with Mickey? -- and there are some good laughs involving an unauthorized
cover version and Harry Shearer's stone-faced lecture on the
anguish of the Civil War. A Mighty Wind is not as biting
as some Guest fans might want it to be, but who wants to see
these people bitten? They're harmless enough, and their music
-- composed by the actors, some of it genuinely good -- brings
them together, like a bridge between personalities or between
eras.
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