Christopher Guest's faux music documentary A Mighty Wind is lacking in laughs and folk-song parodies.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published May 8, 2003
[Photos: Warner Bros.]
Harry Shearer, left, Michael McKean and Christopher Guest are the fictional folk trio the Folksmen in A Mighty Wind.
John Michael Higgins, left, Jane Lynch, Parker Posey and Chris Moynihan are the (New) Main Street Singers in the folk documentary spoof A Mighty Wind.
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I smiled a lot while watching Christopher Guest's latest faux documentary, A Mighty Wind. Even laughed out loud a few times. Normally, that might be enough to feel satisfied with any film trying to be funny.
Not this time, not after the classic comedy of Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap, the movie Guest has been cribbing for years. Not after Waiting for Guffman, Guest's first "mockumentary" experiment. Rarely has a movie been so hilarious for so relatively few viewers. The problems with A Mighty Wind started surfacing with Best in Show, Guest's spoof of dog shows that was severely overrated by some critics, possibly as compensation for not praising him enough before.
In my review of Best in Show, the film's lack of any musical parodies - the backbones of Spinal Tap and Guffman - was a sore point. That changes, but isn't necessarily improved upon, in A Mighty Wind. Guest turns his attention to 1960s folk musicians, a fresh angle for melodic satire that Guest and co-writer Eugene Levy rarely accomplish.
The songs in A Mighty Wind don't expose anything as potentially rich as heavy-metal vapidity or Guffman's community-theater delusions of Broadway fame. In fact, the songs don't sound very different from the 40-year-old hootenanny tunes they're supposedly skewering. Peppy alliteration, cheery egos and vacantly sincere social commentary are amusing, but only to a point. Guest and Levy don't have the courage of their convictions to show this dead-ended optimism for the silly fad it was.
Even worse, they don't seem to think folk music was silly at all. Guest and his Spinal Tap bandmates Michael McKean and Harry Shearer get to show off their musical talents again, this time as the Kingston Trio-style group the Folksmen. But their songs are missing that Tap-ish sense of superiority proving that the songwriters see through the artifice. Comedy requires someone to be inferior in some way in order to succeed. Nobody is inferior in A Mighty Wind, just old and out of style. Not many punch lines there.
The plot, so to speak, of A Mighty Wind concerns a memorial concert for folk music impresario Irving Steinbloom, who didn't even have the decency to die funny. His anal retentive son Jonathan (Bob Balaban) knows nothing about show business but still wants to prove himself to his father. Jonathan contacts three of his father's top acts: the Folksmen, the (New) Main Street Singers ( no original members remain) and the duo Mitch & Mickey (Levy and Catherine O'Hara), inspired by the Dylan-Baez love affair that carried over to their music.
Mitch is the only character in A Mighty Wind that has done something (besides turning gray) since folk music's heyday. Breaking up with Mickey led to his mental breakdown, they haven't seen each other in decades, and the tension springs from wondering if they'll kiss at the climax of their hit song like the old days. Levy's spaced-out depression is the closest any cast member comes to fleshing out a character, but it's more melancholy than funny.
The other acts merely rehearse and riff on past experiences. Shearer deadpans a few choice lines, like recalling how the first Folksman record was solid vinyl: "If you poked a hole in them, you'd have a real good time." Main Street Singer and former Tampa resident Terry Bohner (John Michael Higgins) recalls: "There had been abuse in my family. Mostly of a musical nature." But it takes a lot of rambling chatter to steer these semi-improvised conversations to the point where such good jokes pay off.
Other laughs depend upon how viewers react to straight-faced overstatement, as when Mitch & Mickey's stage kiss is called the "greatest moment in the history of humans." Guest fashions a few worthy sight gags - a chess helmet, Mitch's post-Mickey album covers, a sex shop owned by three brothers named Wisemen - yet much of the humor relies only upon goofy expressions, evaporated hairlines and Fred Willard's increasingly desperate stretches for jokes.
More should have been made of the rivalry between old folkies and the whippersnappers stealing their songs and glory. These characters, and by extension, the real folkies, are so squeaky clean and unaccustomed to aggression that watching them attempt to assert themselves could have been amusing. More backstories and bogus footage from their younger days might have helped. The only hitch to the concert is Mitch's brief disappearance, nothing like the lunacy of Spinal Tap's mistakes.
As it is, A Mighty Wind is a comedy downfall in three acts: In Act 1, meeting the players bodes promise, Act 2 sets them spinning their gears in rehearsal, and the final 30 minutes is just a concert of one-note musicians doing songs without much comedic spark. How many times can Guest get away with this mockumentary thing? The answer, my friend, may be blowing in this stale Wind.
A Mighty Wind
Grade: B-
Director: Christopher Guest
Cast: Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Bob Balaban, Fred Willard, Parker Posey, Jennifer Coolidge, John Michael Higgins, Jane Lynch, Ed Begley Jr.
