Oscar Buzzing

Brian Chubb (Christopher Moynihan), Victor Allan Miller (Harry Shearer), Marilyn Hack (Catherine O'Hara) and Callie Webb (Parker Posey) get Oscar fever in the Christopher Guest film, For Your Consideration. (Suzanne Tenner/Shanri-La Entertainment/Warner Independent Films)

Christopher Guest has an innate understanding of what makes people stupid. He knows that stupidity has nothing to do with education or even intelligence, but pride, an opinion he shares with both God and Milton, neither of whom are as funny as Christopher Guest.

In his 20-plus years as the world’s foremost mockumentarian (a title that’s hilarious in itself), writer-director-actor Guest has dropped his big, improvising casts into a multitude of unlikely situations: a dog show; a folk music concert; the heavy metal has-been circuit. The joke is in the chaos as they collide like pinballs with one another and their egos. Each blinkered character is stupid in his or her own special way, but they are all similarly buffered from true humiliation by their own delusions. This is soft satire, more wink than poke.

People are weirdly territorial about Guest’s films. I’ve seen grown men argue themselves to unattractive puffiness over whether Best in Show is superior to A Mighty Wind (correct answer: Waiting for Guffman, losers). With For Your Consideration, Guest’s ensemble cast reconvenes in Hollywood to take on award season madness and the celebrity machine. Some critics have grumbled that this is fish-in-a-barrel territory, but I found For Your Consideration much livelier, slyer and more alert than the troupe’s last outing, A Mighty Wind, maybe because folk music never struck me as that deserving of satire (a folk musician might feel differently). But the soul-sucking celebrity obscenity peddled by Entertainment Tonight, on the other hand? Bring it on! said the film critic.

Guest plays an Art Garfunkel-frizzed director making a stinky independent weepie called Home For Purim. Playing the lead is Marilyn Hack (Catherine O’Hara), doing the kind of deathbed overacting — voice goes up, down and all around like a numchuk — that really does get Oscar’s glands going. Somehow, a small item appears on the internet suggesting that this little film might be the season’s dark horse, and Hack’s future could hold an Oscar nomination. This tiny carrot is enough to set off a media blitz of Madonna proportions: Marilyn and co-star Victor Allan Miller (Harry Shearer) — the addition of that all-aspiration second name is priceless — hit the talk show circuit. Victor is so endearingly deferential that the Oscar rumour attaches to him, too, to Marilyn’s quiet despair. Soon Oscar buzz is moving amongst the cast like a virus, even infecting the film’s starlet Callie Webb (Parker Posey), a former stand-up comedian who used to talk about moving back to New York and resuscitating her one-woman show No Penis Intended.

Morley Orfkin (Eugene Levy) is a Hollywood agent who smells a hit in For Your Consideration. (Suzanne Tenner/Shanri-La Entertainment/Warner Independent Films)

It’s easy to make fun of Hollywood, and many of the tweaks in For Your Consideration are tired standbys. I didn’t need the repeat joke that Victor Allan Miller most recently played Irv the Foot Long Hotdog in commercials, and Eugene Levy (who co-wrote) may be able to get laughs with his eyebrows the way Chaplin did his ’stache, but he’s still stuck playing the clichéd sleazy, lying agent. 

Films about Hollywood’s hypocrisies that are made in Hollywood tend to be hypocritical themselves. Most of the stars who send up their images — Julia Roberts in The Player, or the parade of smug I’m-not-really-a-bad-boy cameos on HBO’s Entourage — are as culpable as anyone of the thing they claim to abhor: the inauthenticity and avarice of a smoke-and-mirrors industry. But here’s some advice to anyone who has appeared in Vanity Fair, shot by Annie Leibovitz, naked except for a tie or a snake or some well placed surf, accompanied by a profile airier than Cool Whip, selling us the “I’m finally at peace” transformation-of-a-star party line: you are not allowed to make fun of the manufacture of celebrity, so please put on your giant sunglasses and leave.

For Your Consideration lies outside this irritating trend, perhaps because there are no huge names in the cast. From Parker Posey to John Michael Higgins, Guest’s amazing team comprises supporting players who, one imagines, have actually endured the worst of the industry. They are as outside the Vanity Fair fantasy as we the audience, or close to it.

Once Home For Purim — a 1940s period piece about a lesbian daughter returning to her mother’s deathbed — is deemed Academy-worthy, Ricky Gervais, of The Office, appears as a smarm-soaked studio head. His suggestion? Tone down the movie’s “Jewish-ness.” The Purim screenwriters (Bob Balaban and Michael McKean), also chasing Oscar, cave like a bad mine, and soon the new title is Home For Thanksgiving.

In the margins, where the best stuff always happens, Jennifer Coolidge plays one of the film’s producers, spewing jarring non sequiturs. Fred Willard is genius as a lecherous, perpetually inappropriate Extra!-type TV host, a cross between Billy Bush and Pat O’Brien.

But mostly, this is Catherine O’Hara’s show. Here is a comedian without vanity, who, film after film, shows such understated brilliance that it takes a moment to realize she came in, stole the scene and left. When tired, resigned Marilyn first hears of the buzz, she squeaks: “An Os…CAR? Me?” with perfect false humility, reeking of desperation. Quickly, Marilyn goes from middle-aged drab to botoxed horror show with breasts like shelves. But there are flashes of poignancy in this character, too; the big fake may be the only way for an aging actress to win approbation anymore.

That strain of kindness is what makes Guest’s work so appealing. His films don’t challenge an audience’s core beliefs the way that close relative Borat does, and the fake-doc form that seemed so radical in 1984 with This Is Spinal Tap has been abused and dulled by many lesser talents in the intervening 21 years. In fact, For Your Consideration doesn’t dress itself up in the mockumentary framework; a journalist getting interviews for a DVD version of Purim is one of the few references to that old structure. That’s fine: we know what to expect now, and Guest and co.’s patented deflation of hubris doesn’t require much introduction. The doc format was there just to underline the stupidity, but it’s not the stupidity that keeps us coming back to this feast of fools, it’s the sweetness.

For Your Consideration opens Nov. 17.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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