The holiday season has officially begun, and with it comes the usual hype in Hollywood that has everyone guessing and critics speculating left and right. This is the time of the year known as “Oscar Season,” when buzz builds around any movie that doesn’t seem terrible.
This year, however, one movie seems more interested with parodying the phenomenon instead of being a part of it. For Your Consideration, directed by Christopher Guest (Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, Waiting for Guffman), is a new comedy dealing with Oscar buzz surrounding a new movie called Home for Purim.
The film stars many people who have been in multiple other Guest films, including Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Harry Shearer, Jennifer Coolidge, Parker Posey, Christopher Moynihan, Fred Willard, Jane Lynch and Larry Miller.
The movie revolves around the four stars of Home for Purim: Marilyn Hack (O’Hara), Victor Allen Miller (Shearer), Callie Webb (Posey) and Brian Chubb (Moynihan). They are in the middle of shooting the film when the aging Hack, a washed-up actress, finds out that there is buzz on the Internet about her receiving an Oscar for best actress in her new film. This sends the entire cast and crew into a frenzy, and soon Miller’s and Webb’s names have also been thrown out there as possible Oscar nominees.
This causes the actors and actresses to all become very self-aware: Hack needs the nomination to put her back onto the A-list, as does Miller (who, in one of the film’s funniest parts, has been reduced to doing hot dog commercials), and Webb is trying to make the adjustment from comedian to serious actor and needs to legitimize herself with an Oscar bid. Chubb seems to be left out of everything, and ends up breaking up with Webb over the ordeal.
Unlike Guest’s previous films (disregarding the lackluster Almost Heroes), For Your Consideration is not a true mockumentary. This has a different sort of feel from his previous work. Also, the movie is lampooning Hollywood, which is a lot broader than something like a folk music group or people involved with dog shows.
The truth is, Guest seems to be trying to poke fun at too many things at once, and he often comes up short. The film can be very funny at times, but the jokes often are hit-or-miss. It seems that some of the humor can only be understood by someone in the industry or sometimes even by people with a Jewish background.
Although the movie isn’t great by any means, there are many solid performances. Guest (as Home for Purim’s director Jay Berman) and Coolidge (as producer Whitney Taylor Brown) are especially spot-on, which is not surprising. The best performances of all, however, are given by Willard and Lynch, who play Chuck Porter and Cindy Martin (respectively) on a show that resembles Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight. Willard is especially hilarious as Porter, who has a bad haircut and often wears idiotic costumes while gossiping about Hollywood. The best moment of the film occurs near the end, when Porter goes out to interview the Oscar losers just to see their reactions.
Even with the film’s few funny moments, it is not one that has to be seen. Guest fans will be disappointed because it differs so greatly from his previous works, and casual moviegoers may not find the film humorous enough to make it worth seeing. The underlying problem seems to be that there is nothing that really holds the film together, which would be fine if it hit on more of its jokes. Since it doesn’t, though, For Your Consideration seems to be a movie without a backbone-just like the industry it is parodying.