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Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara (along with almost the entire cast of Best In Show) star in this mockumentary which mixes elements of Waiting for Godot with 19??'s Waiting for Fidel into utter irreverence and near-insanity. Guest plays Corky, a New York-based musical director who gets recruited by the small town of Blaine, Missouri, to put on a show for the town's 150th anniversary. The film takes us through the whole kit and caboodle of putting on a show: from the godawful auditions to the tin-eared dialogue and the cardboard cutout special effects. Towards the end, Corky manages to elicit the interest of New York-based reviewer Mr. Guffman, and the cast, predictably, goes into ecstatics as they try to make sure they've got their dance moves and lines down right. None of this adds to the show's quality, however. Picture your little brother's Christmas paegant being reviewed by Siskel and Ebert and you've got the general idea.
The film's humor supposedly resides in the juxtaposition of the musical's utter lack of redeeming qualities and the town's ardent enthusiasm and support over it (it's difficult to determine whether the satirical target is towns who do this kind of stuff in the first place or people who think community theater qualifies as art of any stripe). For me, however, the film's humor lies in each actor's/actress's ability to deliver the most straight-faced self-deprecating lines ever concocted. "Professional" performer Rob Albertson (Fred Willard) prides himself on being "bicostal, if you consider the Mississippi one of the coasts," while Corky's best scathing retort to a quitting castmember, delivered in a perfect scrambling falsetto, is "Well, then, I just HATE you... and I hate your... ass... FACE!" This is subtle, around-the-corner humor that sneaks up on you and hits you over the head. If the movie is viewed as a movie, it doesn't work quite as well, but if it's viewed as a hypothetically real documentary in which we get to observe the foibles of the common citizen without anyone in the picture recognizing them as foibles, it works much more effectively.
--Long
Copyright 2002 Tso Long Productions ©