If you'd told me on the basis of This Is Spinal Tap that Christopher Guest and cohorts would be able to get so much mileage out of the mockumentary, I wouldn't have believed you. But three more faux docs later, and writer/director Guest has miraculously pulled stuff from this seemingly one-joke format that I wouldn't have thought possible. The latest result, A Mighty Wind, is one of the solidest movie comedies in years.
As with Guest's other mock docs (Waiting For Guffman, Best In Show,) Wind tells the offstage stories of a group of hapless performers readying for the Big Show. In this case, it's a folk music tribute ("Ode To Irving") to Irving Steinbloom, the late manager to a trio of pop folkies whose last fleeting success came in the mid-sixties. Steinbloom's son (Bob Balaban), a man so stuntedly reared that his mother wouldn't let him play in Chess Club without a helmet, cajoles and wheedles a reunion concert out of the Folksmen, New Main Street Singers and legendary folk duo Mitch & Mickey. The bulk of the film follows the neurotic leads of each group as they anxiously prepare for their return to the spotlight; the show, we learn, is even going to be broadcast live on public television.
Each set of performers exemplifies a familiar type of sixties folkie: the Folksmen (Guest, Michael McKean & Harry Shearer) are a jauntily clueless version of the Kingston Trio; New Main Street Singers are inoffensive wholesome hootenanny-ites like the New Christy Minstrels, while Mitch & Mickey (Eugene Levy, who co-wrote the frame for the largely improvised film with Guest, and Catharine O'Hara) are meant to parallel boy/girl partnerings like Richard & Mimi Farina. Of the three, the most charged and comically poignant are Levy & O'Hara's characters: their relationship went south almost immediately after their one folk hit, "A Kiss At The End Of The Rainbow," broke on the charts. While Mickey rebounded and married, Mitch suffered a breakdown and has since been yo-yoing in and out of institutions. Gazing into the camera with Levy's patented gobsmacked off-kilter eyes, Mickey speaks in the frayed tones of someone who's spent most of his lifetime on psychotropic meds. Whether he'll be able to hold it together long enough to make it onstage is one of the flick's big questions.
Wind climaxes with the tribute concert and - unlike the agonizingly awful original play put on by Guffman's community theater types - it's a genuinely enjoyable show. Guest and friends clearly have a feel for this music (Main Street Singer lead, John Michael Higgins, does some canny arranging for the mass singalongs), which as written is satiric without being sneering. Mitch & Mickey's love song is pretty, while the Folksmen's repertoire really sounds like it could've come off an album by, oh, the Rooftop Singers.
Article comments
1 - Al Barger
I'll just note briefly that this Kingston Trio album above kicks ass.
2 - Bill Sherman
We're in definite agreement here: "Scotch and Soda" is my all-time fave Trio track. (Not a song that the Folksmen could've pulled off. . .)
3 - Al Barger
Dig their version of "Seasons in the Sun" I was something like 12 when Terry Jacks had his hit single with the song. Hunt down both versions. The Kingston Trio was a surprisingly fresh, harsh blast. Fascinating contrast.