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Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Review: For Your Consideration

On the commentary track of the Criterion Collection edition of Sullivan’s Travels, Christopher Guest and Michael McKean reminisce about possibly the greatest movie-within-a-movie movie ever made. That film is about a man who looks to make a message film to help people, but finds that making a nicely entertaining film helps people enough by itself. While making their movie-within-a-movie movie, Preston Sturges and his stable of actors accomplish just that, so it’s fitting that Guest and his stable of actors do the same with their new film For Your Consideration.

That’s not to say that For Your Consideration is comparable to Sullivan’s Travels; it’s not, but it is an entirely entertaining flick which is well populated with jokes, most of them merely chuckle-worthy, with a few purely laugh out loud moments.

Eschewing his mockumentary principal, Guest and co-writer Eugene Levy shoot for a straight narrative here. As a director, Guest’s aesthetic remains mostly unchanged. There’s a lot of handheld camera-work here, (and coupled with the very funny faux-film clips that show up, it can sometimes look like the BBC series Extras).

The theme of the plot is not all that different from Guest’s Waiting for Guffman. It’s about passionate-and-bad actors getting a rumor about possible stardom – here stemming from internet-created Oscar buzz for their film "Home For Porim", a WWI-era drama about a jewish family in the south coming together for the holidays (as an aside: if there’s a theme to the film, a lesson to be learned, it may be that Yiddish words sternly spoken with a southern accent might be the funniest linguistic thing ever). This buzz grabs the cast and a few local TV shows by storm, and allows for a nice abundance of ego from the cast.

There are some plot points that don’t make a lot of sense – why everyone in the media goes along with the buzz for the whole ride is a bit strange – but those moments allow for some great gags, so what does it really matter?

Guest’s cast here is as good as ever. The reason I mentioned Sullivan’s Travels earlier was due to Guest’s point about Sturges’ stable of actors and the special feeling that you get when you see that familiar face on the screen, and how nice that feeling is. He’s completely right, and you feel that connection often in this film, with his full cast in tow, and a few new faces, if you’re a big fan of Guest’s other films, you’ll really love thinking “Oh, hey, that guy. I wonder what he’s gonna do?” when that familiar face pops up.

For Your Consideration doesn’t have many flaws – it’s a bit shallow, and doesn’t play with its themes about ego, artistic integrity, and hype as well as it could – but it has a lot of jokes, with most of them good, a few great, and very little wasted moments. It’s not an incredible film, or even a really special one, but it’s quite good, and completely worth your time and money to see it.

7.4 out of 10