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For Your Consideration review
:. Director: Christopher Guest
:. Starring: Catherine O'Hara, Stephen Rannazzisi
:. Running Time: 1:26
:. Year: 2006
:. Country: USA
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Christopher Guest's first non-mockumentary film in almost a decade, For Your Consideration is the writer-director-actor's critique of the award-season buzz that, year after year, plagues independent films with a cold insatiability. Marilyn Hack (Catherine O'Hara) is a veteran Hollywood actress whose name is near pejorative; along with Victor Allen Miller (Harry Shearer), a Broadway mainstay now relegated to food advertisements, she is the lead in a low-budget period piece, Home for Purim. Their co-stars, Callie Webb (Parker Posey) and Brian Chub (Christopher Moynihan), are both newcomers whose dull off-screen relationship is momentary Hollywood gossip.
For Your Consideration's overall humor lies in the fact that Home for Purim is a terrible film. Hack's character, the matriarch of a Jewish family in 1940s America, is dying; her husband and son, torn over her imminent passing, are also oblivious when daughter Rachel returns home with "friend" Mary Pat (Rachel Harris as actress Debbie Gilchrist). The holiday culminates in Rachel's revelation that she's gay, which stuns her mother and leaves us cackling. The acting in Home for Purim, as directed by Jay Berman (Christopher Guest), is inconsistent and overindulgent. Miller speaks with a deep and awkward twang, while Hack's dialogue is peppered with incongruous expressions like "mashuganuh." The diegetic music is agonizingly saccharine, and the sets evoke an exultant Norman Rockwell. Yet somehow this seemingly insignificant picture becomes a magnet for positive praise and Oscar buzz, literally destroying all four actors. (In one instance, as the cast debates who's more deserving of the coveted statue, Hack or Webb, an angry Gilchrist shouts, "Dying is easy. Playing a lesbian is hard!")
Behind the scenes of Home for Purim is a massive ensemble of intermittent characters: The film's writers (Bob Balaban and Michael McKean), two overly protective yet wonderfully contrasted partners; the proud, oblivious producer Whitney Taylor Brown (Jennifer Coolidge); toothy studio executive Martin Gib (Ricky Gervais); make-up artist Sandy Lane (Ed Begley Jr); out-of-touch publicist Corey Taft (John Michael Higgins); and Miller's oblivious agent Morley Orfkin (Eugene Levy), among others. Add to that two bickering Siskel and Ebert rip-offs (Don Lake and Michael Hitchcock) and daft "Hollywood Now" co-host Chuck Porter (Fred Willard), and Guest's satirical circle is complete.
Guest's manner of production is legendary. With only a bare outline in hand, he allows his films to unfold as improvisation, leaving him with a wealth of footage once production has ended. With that same formula in play, For Your Consideration doesn't succeed as well as it should. Guest seems to exemplify the selfless director by refusing to exclude any member of his famed ensemble. Every role is superbly humorous but exceedingly underdeveloped; I imagine there are reels of Martin Gib cajoling Purim's cast and crew into unwanted changes, of Whitney Taylor Brown espousing her misguided views on filmmaking, of Corey Taft grinning with his insufferable, if not erroneous praise. Still, Catherine O'Hara manages to be exquisitely funny and, in one short moment near the film's end, candidly heartbreaking. In fact, O'Hara is the film's saving grace, and her character's descent into paranoia and self-destruction is done with such discerning honesty that her performance becomes, ironically, Oscar-worthy.
Adam Balz
 Movie Reviews: from 1998 to 2011
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