Intermittently funny, but lacks the teeth to truly amuse.
Is Hollywood beyond parody? After all, Hollywood has Tom Cruise, and when reality itself is a cosmic joke, all the best punchlines are usually taken.
But Christopher Guest has an ace up his sleeve. For Your Consideration is set in the annual carnival of degradation that is Tinsel Town’s awards season, where Oscar-buzzed family drama, Home For Purim, is threatening to become a breakout success.
That’s the cue for its troupe of actors – among them ageing beauty Marilyn Hack (Catherine O’Hara) and has-been veteran Sandy Lane (Ed Begley Jr) – to suffer, like modern gladiators, in this exquisitely painful circus of adulation and failure.
Though there are no depths of self-promotion to which these actors won’t sink (including Marilyn’s hideously botched botox) there’s a degree of sympathy in the way they’re led like cannon fodder by agents and publicists and studio bosses.
If nothing else, says Guest, at least actors are creative, and if they’re allowed to live in this weird bubble of quasi- emotional innocence, is that really their fault?
Well, yes, might be the answer, but that would only distract from the film’s real target – entertainment journalists. Here is safer and satirically richer ground. Where actors are well-meaning dupes trained like dogs to sit up and beg for love, journos are the boil on the arse of the industry – corrupt and complicit and dependent on people who, you suspect, they loathe only a little bit less than themselves.
This is Guest at his most vicious, but also his most visually subtle, skewering the pomposity of Inside the Actors Studio or the absurdity of E! in a haircut or a single, uncomfortable silence.
These are the moments when For Your Consideration is jolted out of its all-too-comfortable air of lightly amused mickey taking. Elsewhere it feels too much like an insiders’ club, like Guest didn’t really have the stomach to go for the throat. As such it lacks the operatic bathos of Spinal Tap, or even the quiet intelligence of A Mighty Wind.
Despite the odd good gag and basic worthiness, For Your Consideration isn’t quite a contender.
Spinal Tap goes Hollywood.
Intermittently funny, but lacks the teeth to truly amuse.
Turn on the TV instead – it’s all there, and it’s funnier and scarier and more messed up.
