For Your Consideration

Posted by Matthew Alexander (matthew@filmschoolrejects.com) on December 21, 2006

Another movie from Christopher Guest and Company, the ones who brought us Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, now graces the silver screen. Like its predecessors, For Your Consideration follows a now familiar cast as they play characters participating in some chosen endeavor. Before it was an amateur play, a dog show and a folk music concert; this time it is a movie in the midst of filming. The formula has worked before, so I see no reason why it can’t work again, but it is apparent that this particular time it has not yielded the same results as in the past.

One thing I have noticed as I have followed the progression of Guest movies is that they keep collecting more actors as they go. Unfortunately, their ideas do not require any increasing amount of thespians so we are left with many very small and scarcely consequential parts that seem thrown in to make room for some friends, and I am fairly sure that is what has happened. And as the parts grow more numerous, less attention is devoted to each one. In For Your Consideration, we never really get a good beginning, middle and end to any character arc, even the leads. What we have is more akin to bits and pieces of a story thrown at us in order but with large gaps.

And that’s how the entire story feels too. There is no real sense of the whole process, just parts of it here and there. Afterward, I almost felt like I had seen merely an extended trailer, so little progress in the story is there. The websites say the movie is 86 minutes long, but it felt more like 30, and not because I was having so much fun. It felt like 30 minutes and I was cheated of the other 56. There is no real distinction between a first and a second act, and the third one is not even recognized as such until it is over because it arrives with little expectation and less momentum (as well as fizzles out without fanfare). Contrast this with Best in Show, whose final act is a supremely satisfying culmination to two very well directed and developed previous acts. Ditto for the other two Guest works.

There are stronger aspects to point out. For instance there are some funny jokes and situations, and it’s always fun to poke fun at the Hollywood culture and method. And the actors are still able to milk some comedy out of goofy situations. Even though a few seem to be quirky without ringing true, most of them are at least cute and interesting.

One character who rings very true, and yet is a bit of a killjoy, is played by the lead actress, Catherine O’Hara. She does a fine job with her role of Marilyn Hack, but she is too pitiable to elicit laughter. We could always laugh at the defects of characters in other Guest movies because no one really gets hurt. John Cleese pointed out the importance of this in his series Fawlty Towers: he was careful never to allow his characters to be truly hurt by Basil’s acerbic tongue. Guest has run afoul of this advice because we feel very badly for Marilyn Hack, who is not just another eccentric goon on the set but rather a woman with real emotional problems in her life. It simply would be too cruel to laugh at her, and that’s bad news for a comedy.

There is much to criticize in the film, and yet it is not as bad as all that. Perhaps it is high expectations which lead me to dwell on its faults. There are many truly funny moments, and even a little keen perception too. I enjoyed myself at times, but I never did shake the feeling that things were missing. The experience is not a waste, but neither is it the triumph that other Guest movies have been.

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