When a friend of mine in L.A. used to get stuck behind slow drivers she'd start hollering, "Slower, please! Can't you go any slower?!" That's how I felt during Christopher Guest's A Mighty Wind, a pseudo-documentary about a reunion concert at New York's Town Hall of three of the (fictional) star groups of the '60s folk music scene. This is the fourth fake documentary by Guest, who also directed, and his team, which includes actor and co-writer Eugene Levy, and, at various times, the performers Catherine O'Hara, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Parker Posey, Fred Willard, Bob Balaban, Ed Begley, Jr., Jane Lynch, Jennifer Coolidge, Paul Dooley, John Michael Higgins, and Michael Hitchcock. The first, and most famous, is This Is Spinal Tap (1984), about a heavy metal rock band on tour, written by Guest but directed by Rob Reiner. Guest took over directing with Waiting for Guffman (1997), about provincial amateur theatricals, and followed it with Best in Show (2000), a take-off of New York's Westminster Dog Show.
The hallmarks of Guest's style are a satirical outlook more affectionate than harsh; an interweaving of the bustling ensemble as they converge for the big show; a transparent treatment of the characters as they reveal their obsessions or quirks (that is, they talk as if they were perfectly normal but we can see they're freaks); longish takes that leave a few extra seconds of dead space after choice bits, so the jokes don't seem like professional comedy material but like something "caught" by the filmmakers. It is said that the cast improvises but the movies don't feel improvised to me. If the approach was ever experimental the experiments have by now been reduced to practice and Guest has taken out a patent on the method. A Mighty Wind, which features performances of songs written for the movie so dead-on they make you do a cognitive double take, feels like a Saturday Night Live sketch expanded nearly to the scope of Robert Altman's panoramic satire of the country-music scene Nashville (1975). What's lacking is the magisterial style to make the ersatz world at once chaotic in a lifelike way and idiosyncratically visionary.
A Mighty Wind is likable, but I realized after about 20 minutes that my face ached from the same kind of effort I make at a dull dinner party to be polite when I'm not having a good time. The extra beat in the takes gives the movie a dead air feeling that is different from the inertness of something like Legally Blonde because it's intended. But that doesn't help if your experience at the movie isn't pleasurable. Fred Willard repeats his Best in Show specialty as a show biz automaton who spouts inanities and catchphrases. You may appreciate his energy and still feel that when he comes on once again with not only the same kind of routine but the very same lines, the fact that it's being done on purpose doesn't relieve the predictability (or the obnoxiousness). "Offbeat" just becomes the beat.
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