The Show Must Go On

I'd recently sampled two of Christopher Guest's "mockumentaries," A Mighty Wind and Waiting for Guffman, and after squeezing in a few different movies since, I decided it was time to go back for another helping. This time, I checked out Best in Show, a film built around a dog show and the owners competing in it.

This was another enjoyable movie. It would be hard for it not to be, involving much of the same team. The script was once again a collaboration between Guest and Eugene Levy. It featured most of the actors from this sort-of "rep company": Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Parker Posey, Michael McKean, John Michael Higgins, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Lynch, Fred Willard, and of course, Guest himself.

I actually felt like this movie came on even stronger than the others I'd seen. The introductions of all the characters and explorations of who they are was funny, funny stuff. Nearly everyone was paired off in some kind of couple, and watching the pairs interact with each other was sometimes zany, sometimes painfully awkward, but always amusing. I found myself laughing out loud on a regular basis for 45 straight minutes.

But then the movie actually arrives at the all-important event, the dog show itself. And then it unfortunately turns uncomfortably like watching an actual dog show... or at least, what I imagine one would be like if I'd ever decided to watch one on television -- which I don't think I ever would, expecting complete boredom. The movie comes way too close to delivering exactly that. For whatever reason, the characters all just stop being funny, as though some switch were thrown, and the movie becomes overly concerned with progressing a plot and building suspense over who will win. (As if that's important!)

The thing that saves the movie from coming completely off the rails at this point is the other-worldly performance of Fred Willard as an idiotic TV personality giving color commentary on the event. I know now that this film is exactly what the makers of Dodgeball were thinking of when they brought in Gary Cole and Jason Bateman to deliver the funniest material of that already-funny movie. I wouldn't say Willard brings the biggest laughs here of the entire film, but he is the one who keeps any laughs going during this oddly serious stretch of the film.

Ultimately, the feeling I felt of drifting away from the comedy didn't last too long. It's only a 90-minute film overall, and the last 10 minutes are a series of "wrap-ups" for the characters that does put the emphasis back on the humor. My only disappointment, really, is in the feeling that I was heading for a grade A movie by the halfway point in the film. It is nevertheless a mostly funny movie definitely worth seeing. I rate it a B.