Guest tickles our funny bone, just not as much as we’d like.
I don’t think that many people minded the absence of Simon and Garfunkal and the rest of the tired out folksingers from the 60’s and 70’s. Leave it to director Christopher Guest to revive some of the vinyl hero personalities that came from this musical era. With his genius use of his branded kind of comedy which comes from the distinctive form of the mockumentary, Guest brings back a comedy format that truely emphasizes the quirkiness in us humans.
The set-up of his newest picture is a replica of the beauty pageant for dogs’ scenario, replacing the love for mutts with the love of music and the affection found in simpler times. This big show is a concert in the loving memory of a legendary producer which brings together an ensemble of retro folk artists. Folk artists? This is a job for only one group of people. With the habitual cast of regulars, we find faces that started as far back as This is Spinal Tap to Waiting for Guffman. This comedy troupe of experts in the improv domain offer up some of the most goofy portraits of these minimally famed artists. Funny album covers and dated pictures are combined inside the documentary formula which sees doc-style interviews intermixed with fly-on-the-wall episodes that capture this species of humans doing what they do. In the long run we get the sense that Guest gets a little too loose on narrative structure and lets the improvisational interpretations carry the better part of the picture, normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but this time it seems as if there are plenty of holes or stretches where the film is simply not funny.
When friends would return my DVD copy of the little seen Best in Show, they would first acknowledge that the film was manifestly funny as hell, and then they would comment on the quirks and behaviors of their favorite characters. What was so good about that film was how we got a better sense of the character’s personalities by going through the banal experiences with them; this film seems to bypass the accompaniment close-up portraits and rather offers us a bird’s eye view of the creation process of the folk way of making music. The musical numbers are fine, they’re just not funny. It seems as if the comedy troupe couldn’t muster any original material besides making everything into a sexual pun such as “find the cobra with the chamber lady†type of jokes. The centerpiece characters of Mitch and Mickey are comedically tame; Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara who offered us a portrait of the best terrier owners in the world in their previous pairing, come off looking like true space candidates with nothing to offer. What makes A Mighty Wind less of a favorite is that the back-story isn’t has rich and the narrative rush with the final big concert is hard to watch because the song numbers are simply not that enjoyable.
A Mighty Wind is a comedy that feels forced, and you really never get the chance to stick to the characters, with no clear favorites moments or characters and missing out on the genuine moments that made me laugh in the preivous effort such as the ‘Two left feet’, the naming of different types of ‘nuts’ and the missing ‘yellow bee’. Instead, I found myself tolerably waiting until more than just a humorous sequence but a true break-out ha-ha funny string of moments which unfortunately never came across. If you want to see guitar licks and see how a mockumentary should tick rent out Guest’s imaginative This is Spinal Tap.