 Starring: Eugene Levy, Christopher Guest, Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, Michael McKean
Director: Christopher Guest
Year Of Release: 2000
Plot: This mock documentary follows various people as they prepare for and compete at the Mayflower Dog Show. Highly strung Meg and Hamilton pamper their dog to a ridiculous extent, in order to ignore the problems in their own relationship. Harlan Pepper leaves his southern fishing shop behind to see whether his hound can take the prize, and mismatched couple Gerry and Cookie Fleck compete, while he tries to get used to that fact Cookie has slept with pretty much every man in America. |
Christopher Guest’s movies aren’t quite like any other director’s. Although his first comedy mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap, was directed by somebody else (he starred in it as Nigel Tufnel and co-created the film, although Rob Reiner was the director), since then he’s turned himself into the master of the form. Although Spinal Tap was made in 1984, he didn’t direct his own mockumentary until 1996’s Waiting For Guffman. He’s since followed that movie with Best In Show, A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration (which isn’t strictly a mockumentary, but was made using similar principals to his earlier films).
Although Best In Show was a minor hit, the rest are relatively little seen. It’s a shame really, because in my opinion both Waiting For Guffman and A Mighty Wind are better than the dog show based Best In Show. It’s likely neither Guffman of Wind made a big splash because they’re about subjects that aren’t immediately going to attract a lot of people.
Waiting For Guffman is about an arty but awful theatre director convinced of his own genius, trying to put of an amateur musical in a small town, while A Mighty Wind is about 60s folk singers having a reunion concert. Even the success of Best In Show was probably lessened by the fact a lot of people are unlikely to think a movie about dog shows is going to be their cup of tea. While For Your Consideration was about a more mainstream subject, the movie business, it wasn’t as good a film, and also felt like it was merely rehashing a lot of the ideas of Waiting For Guffman.
However, what Guest’s odd subjects and the unusual way he makes his films allow him to do, is get to a peculiar form of truth. Admittedly the characters are taken to the extremes and are often very silly, but they tap into the genuine, small oddities of human nature that often get overlooked.
The thing that probably makes Guest’s films feel so unique is that they’re largely improvised. Rather than writing down a very strict script, Guest and co-writer Eugene Levy create a guideline for what scenes will feature in the movie and what needs to happen. They also create backgrounds for each of the characters and a full structure for the film, but most of the rest of it is left to the actors.
It’s one of the reason the same people appear in most of his movies – such as his old Spinal Tap bandmates Mike McKean and Harry Shearer, as well as Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, Bob Balaban, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Lynch, Larry Miller, Fred Willard and others – because it’s such an unusual way of working that whenever Guest finds people who are good at improvising and working within his unique style, he hangs onto them. As Guest mentions in the special features of the Best In Show DVD, several scenes were cut out of the movie because actors for minor roles just couldn’t handle the improvisational style. And improv is a lot harder than it looks, as you don’t just have to worry about yourself, you also have to think about the other people in the scene, ensure you get all the necessary info across, be funny and make sure it doesn’t get boring.
As well as the scenes that take you through the plot, his films also feature interviews with the main participants at various stages of the plot. The way he does these is just to tell the actors where they are in the story and what particular things they ought to cover, and then switch the camera on and let them go. The scene doesn’t end until the camera runs out of film, so it’s really just people talking in character for 10 minutes, which tends to give them time to discover unusual and funny things and get to the truth of how people think. Guest then takes these long takes and edits them down into the nuggets you see on the screen.
Most filmmakers would be too terrified to work in this freeform way, as you literally never known what you’re going to get until you switch the camera on, but it allows Guest to explore the peculiarities of his characters in unique ways by implicitly trusting his actors to deliver the goods. For example in Best in Show’s there’s Cookie and Gerry Fleck. She’s a former sexpot who’s slept with hundreds and hundreds of men, while he’s a dull super-nerd who was born with two left feet (literally). They are a couple that shouldn’t work, and if you wrote a screenplay, it would be difficult to think of ways to get the audience to accept that two such different people would be together. However, by giving the actors freedom to explore their characters, Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy manage to find the truth in the relationship, and the safety, security and quiet love the couple share.
Guest himself dislikes the terms mockumentary, as he says he doesn’t want to mock anybody. All he wants to do is use humour to explore unusual, insular worlds, such as local community theatre, dog show people and folk singers – however while he doesn’t like the word mockumentary, even he doesn’t have a term to describe exactly what he does.
Whatever it ought to be called, his films are pretty unique (even Mike Leigh’s films have a full script written before the camera starts rolling, despite initially being improvised and workshopped with the actors) and he has created some truly wonderful movies. They’re not only hilarious, but seem to get to the truth of what he’s exploring in ways it would be very difficult to do in a more traditional movie. His films also give free reign to some brilliantly talented comic actors, who really get to show off how wonderful they are (Catherine O’Hara in particular is brilliant in all of Guest’s films).
Guest’s movies really ought to be watched by a wider audience, because they are absolutely wonderful and a hell of a lot funnier than most of what Hollywood produces. Christopher Guest has a way of bringing together subjects, actors, characters and ideas to create something unique and really rather special, whether he’s exploring amateur theatre, folk singing or indeed dog shows.
Oh, and if you have seen Best In Show and are wondering if real pure-bed dog owners are as obsessed with their canines as they are in the film, one of the biggest problems they had during the filming of the movie was when the owner of the main poodle in the film pulled her dog out of the film when she discovered that her beloved pure-bred wasn’t going to win the fictional Mayflower Dog Show. It would seem then that maybe the nuttiness of Best In Show is more underplayed than it looks.
TIM ISAAC
PREVIOUS: Ben-Hur – Or, why going to the cinema in the past was far more special than it is today
NEXT: Big Fish - Or, why no one in Hollywood should be allowed to have kids
CLICK HERE to see the index of 909 films and TV shows the Movie-A-Day Project will be covering
CLICK HERE to find out more about the idea behind The Movie-A-Day Project
CLICK HERE to follow Movie_A_Day on Twitter
