Christopher Guest might not have invented the mockumentary but he’s certainly responsible for the funniest ones ever made. Starting off with Spinal Tap in 1984, which is constantly topping lists of the funniest films ever made, he went on to cement his mastery of the genre with the less well known but equally brilliant Waiting For Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. His last cinematic effort was For Your Consideration in 2006, which wasn’t quite up to his usual standards of hilarity but was still the funniest film of the year.
Guests’ movies have indirectly shaped American comedy both in cinema and on TV. His improvisational style (his company of actors know the basic storyline but all dialogue is ad-libbed) has been partially adopted by Judd Apatow in his blockbusters like Knocked Up and Funny People. The difference is that in Guest films this style makes it feel like you’re watching assorted oddballs and deeply strange people talking as they would in real life, Apatow’s movies always feel like you’re watching a lot of obnoxious comedians shouting over each other as they try to be the one to squeeze in the most dick jokes.
Then there’s Ricky Gervais, who’s often said that Guest was the biggest influence on The Office, which wasn’t improvised but was written and acted to sound like it was. Since The Office was shipped over to America it’s reshaped the traditional sitcom with huge shows like Modern Family and Parks & Recreation shot in a documentary style with characters acknowledging the film crew and talking directly to camera. What’s different, and kind of annoying, about the style of these shows is how they only adopt the documentary approach when it’s convenient; they’ll often completely abandon it and have the camera filming from perspectives that a film crew would never have.
Guests’ films were always committed to the mockumentary idea. They were presented as documentaries about fringe groups in society: an aging heavy metal band, a small-town amateur theatre group, dog-show enthusiasts and actors desperate for award recognition.
So it’s disappointing that Guests’ first expedition into the world of television comedy feels much closer in tone and approach to the shows he influenced rather than his own films. Family Tree is the story of Tom Chadwick (Chris O’Dowd), an aimless Londoner who’s lost his job and his girlfriend. He decides to start researching his heritage, a decision that takes eventually takes him across the Atlantic. The thing is he’s apparently being followed by a documentary crew before he ever makes this decision and it’s never explained why or what the nature of the documentary is. It’s perhaps a little nitpicky to complain about this, and in all fairness it might only be something that irritates pedants like me but it’s immediately obvious that Family Tree doesn’t have the same commitment to the faux-documentary genre as Guests’ films and feels more like a modern mainstream sitcom.
Not that there’s anything wrong with a lot of modern mainstream sitcoms and this would be easy to forgive if the laughs came as thick and fast as they do in his films. Unfortunately, they’re few and far between. That may well just be because Guest needed so much more footage than before. With his films he was able to take hours and hours of improvised craziness and whittle it down to form a tight 90 minutes of comedy. But here he has 10 episodes and 300 minutes to fill and often great big chunks of it go by without anything funny happening. It’s no exaggeration to say that there are more laugh out loud moments in the first 15 minutes of Spinal Tap than in the entire first season of Family Tree.
It’s probably unfair to blame the cast for the lack of laughs. Here Guest employs a lot of his usual company of actors, familiar and reliable faces like Michael McKean, Fred Willard and Bob Balaban, who all play typically ridiculous characters. McKean is especially good as Tom’s relentlessly chirpy dad Keith, bringing back his near flawless English accent from Spinal Tap, and Willard does his usual confident-weirdo-making-everyone-uncomfortable thing. Guest also makes a brief appearance himself as a distant cousin from North Carolina who’s constantly talking about his missing wife. Sadly, his character is far more sinister than he is funny; this may be because Guest was too generous with the other actor’s screen time, only appearing in a couple of scenes himself and not having much chance to develop the character.
As well as Guests’ usual collaborators the cast is filled up with new faces both British and American. O’Dowd can’t be faulted and more than holds his own with the more experienced improvisers and makes Tom pathetic without being irritating. The same can’t really be said of Tom Bennet as his best friend Pete. He does get some good lines in but he’s stuck in the thankless “moronic sidekick role and starts to get very annoying very fast. He’s also the guiltiest of doing what a lot of current British comedy actors are guilty of mimicking Ricky Gervais’ performance in The Office. With his constantly letting sentences trail off unfinished, looking sheepishly into camera and giggling to himself, Bennet is Gervaising like nobody’s business.
The best performance in Family Tree, and what it’ll be remembered for if it only lasts for the one season, comes from Nina Conti as Tom’s sister Bea. Conti has been familiar to British audiences for years for her ventriloquism stand-up act where her most faithful prop has been her Monkey puppet. In a stroke of genius she gets to work with Monkey in the show as it’s explained that following a traumatic experience as a child she was given the puppet to help her communicate and still uses it as a full grown woman. Bea is as polite and friendly as an Englishwoman abroad should be but the Monkey reveals her innermost and often extremely offensive thoughts. She’s absolutely hilarious and even the veteran ad-libbers often seem taken aback by what she comes up with. If Family Tree does get renewed for a second season it’d be a wise move to make Bea the star because Conti’s performance is really the only memorable thing about it.
Overall Verdict: Christopher Guest and company’s first foray into TV land is a rambling and unfocused disappointment. It has the odd hilarious moment, most of them featuring Nina Conti, but held up to the high standards of his film work it is woefully light on laughs.
Special Features:
Deleted Scenes
Reviewer: Adam Pidgeon