REVIEW
A MIGHTY WIND
Starring Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara and Bob Balaban
Directed by Christopher Guest
Written by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy
Opens Friday, May 9
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Comedic filmmakers get short shrift – sure, Chaplin and Keaton were brilliant, but that was 80 years ago. Today, when you’re expecting gut-splitting, bladder-bursting laughter that makes your sides ache and your sphincters loosen, Christopher Guest is your man. He’s delivered – like an obstetrician with a grease gun – on many occasions in the past. You could even see Guest as the pre-eminent satirist of our time.
Although concerned with arcane subject matter, his two previous features – Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show – are among the funniest portrayals of Middle American life made in the past decade. It wasn’t necessary to know much about community theatre and dog shows, respectively, to appreciate those films, because they were populated with characters so absurdly realistic that the sight gags and one-liners came fast and furiously.
When it was announced that Guest and company’s new film, A Mighty Wind, would be aiming its satirical skewers at the folk music scene, my mind was dazzled with the possibilities. Folk musicians, being a rather self-righteous lot on the whole, seemed the perfect subject for the kind of dressing down that Guest and his collaborators – including SCTV alumni Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara – would be happy to give them. Moreover, it takes just one trip to a folk festival to realize that many folk music fans could also use a little friendly ridicule, what with their short-legged lawn chairs, territorial blanket wars and so on.
So, as Fred Willard’s character in A Mighty Wind might say, "Wha’ happen’?"
The film bears a remarkable similarity to Guffman and Best in Show, but there’s something missing – the laughs. First, A Mighty Wind is not concerned with contemporary folk music, but a rather dubious brand of acoustic schmaltz that was popular back in the early 1960s. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but the material isn’t milked nearly as dry as it could and should have been.
The film chronicles a reunion of three of these cheese-folk groups for a public broadcasting network’s television special to honour their patron, the late Irving Steinbloom. The crux of the film is whether Steinbloom’s two favourite stars, Mitch (Levy) and Mickey (O’Hara), former lovers who haven’t spoken much since the traumatic recording of their last album, will re-form their popular duo in time for the show.
Perhaps if you were a fan of Sing Along with Mitch, you’ll find A Mighty Wind to be fabulously funny – but I doubt it. God knows, I’ve heard enough stories about dog lovers who hated Best in Show.
I wanted to love A Mighty Wind, and I even tried willing myself to laugh harder, but it’s just not on the same level as those earlier movies. There’s nothing to match "God Loves a Terrier" or the ludicrousness of My Dinner With Andre action figures, no irreverent catalogue of the world’s various types of nuts, and no running jokes that just get funnier as the film proceeds towards its bathetic end. Even the songs, which have been a staple of Guest’s work since he directed and starred in This is Spinal Tap back in 1984 – and which are integral to the story of A Mighty Wind – don’t contain many satirical jabs.
That said, there is one genuinely touching moment between Levy and O’Hara that almost has me convinced that the film is about defying expectations. Is it possible that Guest and the rest of his comic ensemble are trying to escape the trappings of their earlier work, to cast off the burden of being funny men and women once and for all? Hardly, but it is a nice moment – almost worth seeing, once the film’s released on DVD. |
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