Guest Again

Having recently enjoyed the Christopher Guest-directed "mockumentary" A Mighty Wind, I decided to check out another of his films, Waiting for Guffman. I thought there was a reasonable chance I might actually like this movie better, given the subject matter -- it follows a group of small town players trying to put on a piece of community theater. I've both seen and performed in bad theater, and really knew it was an environment full of comic potential.

On the plus side, the film really does nail that aspect. It walks the perfect line of a lack of self-awareness on the part of the characters, without the play-within-the-movie ever getting so bad that it's no longer believable that they wouldn't know how bad it is. The movie hits on plenty of amateur theater clichés, which I suppose is the thing I was really looking for.

And yet, the movie is neither as funny nor as heartfelt as A Mighty Wind. The laugh out loud moments are rather sparse, and you're never really made to empathize with any of the characters. This movie seems much more at a distance, like it doesn't really have anything more to say than the simple premise, "boy, doesn't community theater usually stink?"

The typical "Guest players" (that is, the regulars in Christopher Guest movies, not the ones who only appeared in this movie) do good work, as always. Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Catherine O'Hara, Parker Posey, and Christopher Guest himself... they all make "clueless" believable. They each have their moments to shine.

Perhaps I'd have thought better of this movie had I not seen A Mighty Wind. Or more to the point, had I not just seen it -- the formula of building up to a big performance does feel awfully similar here. Some space between the two might have helped. Even though this movie was the one actually made first, I think it's a formula that was nailed much better the next time around.

I rate Waiting for Guffman a B-. It's not bad at all, but wouldn't be first on my list of Christopher Guest movies.