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What’s New on DVD
Christopher Guest’s lampoonery strikes again

 

A Mighty Wind

To the targets of Christopher Guest’s movie spoofs, there is, no doubt, a fish-in-a-barrel element. His Waiting for Guffman lampooned small-town community theatre, while Best in Show savaged that vestigial remnant of old-school blue-blood snobbery, dog shows.

Though he didn’t direct it, Guest was also among the perpetrators of the classic This Is Spinal Tap, which torpedoed heavy metal.

Guest’s latest, A Mighty Wind, takes on folk music—not folk music as it’s known to the historian or the archivist, but rather the slick folk-as-pop that had a brief vogue in the ‘60s, and turned middle-class kids into would-be coffeehouse bohos.

The surprise is that this time, the guileless sincerity of the target rates a lighter touch by Guest, and the result is his sweetest movie yet.

Like the aforementioned films, A Mighty Wind is a mock-documentary, though this conceit is loosely maintained; whenever Guest finds it convenient, he unobtrusively dispenses with the device and gives us conventional narrative crosscutting that documentary cameras couldn’t manage.

The premise is that a legendary folk promoter has died, and his anxious, obsessive-compulsive nebbish of a son (Bob Balaban) is trying to organize a public-television memorial concert for him in New York.

We follow three principal strands, each surrounding one of the fictitious has-been ensembles headed to the concert.

Group One is the Folksmen, a harmonizing Kingston Trio-type outfit consisting of Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer—incredibly, the front line-up of Spinal Tap.

Group Two is the Main Street Singers, a ghastly, happy-faced neuftet in the vein of the New Christy Minstrels, led by John Michael Higgins, Jane Lynch and Parker Posey.

Group Three—and the startling emotional center of the film—is the duet Mitch and Mickey. Their big hit was a schmaltzy love song called A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow, in the middle of which they would smooch for real.

After a tempestuous breakup, Mickey (Catherine O’Hara) got married (to catheter merchant Jim Piddock) and dropped out of showbiz, while Mitch (Eugene Levy) has been in a mental institution.

Their tentative reunion is unexpectedly wistful and tender, and the film’s suspense eventually comes to hinge on whether poor Mitch will manage to rise out of his zonked depression long enough to perform.

The storyline, sketched out by Guest and Levy with dialogue largely improvised by the cast, tones down the earlier films’ strategy of inflicting endless catastrophes and humiliations on the characters.

Overall, there’s a minimum of going for the laugh in A Mighty Wind, and the characters aren’t made to suffer mercilessly.

Preposterous though they are, the songs, most of them written by the cast, are bright and listenable, and lustily performed. This is probably the best comedy I’ve seen this year—low-key and gentle and generous-hearted and, well, folksy.

The DVD: The DVD editions of Guest’s films tend to be packed with juicy extras, and Mighty Wind is no exception: There’s funny audio commentary by Guest and Levy, a collection of vintage clips of the performers on fictitious—and expertly faked—old TV shows, and an unedited version of the memorial concert.

There’s a large assortment of deleted scenes, and unlike on most DVDs, many of these are actually worth watching; a few even include whole numbers.

Guest’s method is to shoot hours and hours of footage and boil it down to the best 90 minutes. Inevitably this method means boiling away some choice tidbits. The DVD keeps them from going to waste.

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