For Your Consideration is an Anomaly in Christopher Guest's Directorial Career in that it Kind of Sucks
Schitt’s Creek reigns as one of pop culture’s most heart-warming and richly earned success stories. It’s the little show that could, a scrappy Canadian vehicle for the universally beloved Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara that burst defiantly out of the Canadian television ghetto to become an international triumph.
Schitt’s Creek liberated co-creator and star Eugene Levy from the dreary tyranny of paying the bills with supporting performances in direct-to-video American Pie spin-offs and empowered him to do some of the best work of his extraordinary career, alongside his ferociously talented and handsome son/co-creator/co-star Dan, no less.
The beloved Canadian crowd-pleaser with the great big heart reminded the world what a Goddess and treasure Catherine O’Hara remains and gave her arguably her very finest role in Moira Rose, b-movie actress, world-class eccentric and force of nature.
A fairy tale like Schitt’s Creek deserves a fairy tale ending. It got one on September 20th when its sustained brilliance was honored at the 2020 Emmy Awards with a clean sweep of the major comedy awards.
To the surprise of few and delight of many, Schitt’s Creek’s final season was rewarded with victories for Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (Eugene Levy), Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series (Dan Levy), Outstanding Directing (Anthony Cividino and Dan Levy), Outstanding Writing (Dan Levy), Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series (Catherine O’Hara) and Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series (Annie Murphy).
Schitt’s Creek domination of the Emmys in its final season had to be particularly satisfying for its cast and crew since it’d only scored four Emmy nominations for its previous five seasons, with zero wins.
The evening was nothing short of a coronation: Schitt’s Creek was being recognized as one of the all-time greats by the biggest awards in television. Schitt’s Creek deserved all of the awards it won that magical night and more.
For Levy and O’Hara, the sitcom about a wealthy family reduced to running a motel in a small town they bought as a joke represents an accomplishment on par with their wildly influential, critically acclaimed work with SCTV and director/screenwriter Christopher Guest, who directed four movies starring Levy and O’Hara and co-written by Levy between 1996 and 2006: 1996’s Waiting For Guffman, 2000’s Best in Show, 2003’s A Mighty Wind and finally 2006’s For Your Consideration.
The story of Schitt’s Creek ended in the best possible way: with a flurry of awards tardily but sincerely honoring its greatness. O’Hara and Levy’s largely improvised collaborations with Guest, meanwhile, ended with a movie explicitly about a desperate hunt for awards, this time the Oscars.
By the time Guest got the band back together for For Your Consideration, diminishing returns had set in. But the big problem, beyond over-familiarity, is that For Your Consideration puzzlingly chooses to lampoon a version of the movie industry that does not currently exist, and probably never has.
This distracting lack of verisimilitude begins with the film-within-a-film at the show-business spoof’s core: Home for Purim, an impossibly old-fashioned, over-the-top melodrama about a Jewish family reconnecting for the holidays for their histrionic matriarch. It’s the kind of groaningly earnest family drama they just don’t make anymore because they never started making them in the first place.
Home For Purim makes the screamingly histrionic agitprop of Clifford Odets look positively subtle and understated by comparison. It’s an exceedingly, preposterously Jewish story from people who have somehow gone their entire lives and careers without encountering Jews or Jewish customs and have collaborated on a film that reflects that profound lack of understanding.
Catherine O’Hara’s subtly monikered Marilyn Hack, a struggling actress who sees Home For Purim as her big chance for professional redemption, is the most Irish-Catholic Jewish matriarch in film history.
The rest of the cast are nearly as gentile. The closest stodgy Victor Allan Miller (Harry Shearer) comes to being Jewish involves playing a Kosher hot dog in a series of commercials while Callie Webb (Parker Posey), who plays the family’s lesbian daughter, and Brian Chubb (Christopher Moynihan), who plays the son, deliver the copious Yiddish in the screenplay as if uncomfortably encountering each phrase for the first time.
Home for Purim’s uniquely inept fusion of Tennessee Williams-style Southern gothic and Kosher melodrama looks unwatchable but very early in the misbegotten production Marilyn’s hammy turn begins to attract Oscar buzz.
The Oscar buzz initially takes the form of someone on the internet saying Marilyn’s performance could make her a contender for the Best Actress Academy Award. That’s all it takes.
Corey Taft (John Michael Higgins), Home for Purim’s enthusiastically idiotic publicist, seems to have a vague hunch that something called “the internet” exists, and has something to do with email, but that’s the extent of his knowledge about the driving engine of contemporary pop culture.
Unfortunately, For Your Consideration seems to understand the overlapping realms of internet hype and the toxic culture of Academy Awards speculation only slightly better than its intentionally clueless, oblivious characters do.
In For Your Consideration’s annoyingly off universe, a random comment on the internet about a modestly budgeted movie seemingly has as much of a positive impact on its award chances as a Blitzkrieg-style blitz from Miramax at the height of its awful power would.
Home for Purim deviates from Waiting For Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, and This Is Spinal Tap, for that matter, in eschewing the mockumentary conceit Guest is synonymous with. But the movie looks and feels so much like Guest’s other movies that it would be easy to mistake it for another mockumentary.
The only real difference between Guest’s mockumentaries and For Your Consideration is that in movies like Waiting for Guffman the zany losers are being interviewed for a fake documentary while in For Your Consideration they are forever being lobbed softball questions from an entertainment press suddenly obsessed with the movie’s chances at Oscar glory.
O’Hara begins For Your Consideration playing a relatable human being who looks and acts her age but as Oscar fever sweeps the film and its cast she gets bigger and broader and more cartoonish.
By the time Home For Purim has been completed as Home For Thanksgiving with its award buzz, if not its integrity or name intact, Marilyn has made a dramatic if not terribly surprising transformation from artist to a wild-eyed creature of the industry who has unsuccessfully used the dark magic of cosmetic surgery to look like someone half as young and a tenth as dignified.
Victor, Marilyn’s stodgy leading man, makes a similarly dramatic transformation from mature adult to failed young person awkwardly bumping and grinding his way through the film’s parody of Total Request Live in a desperate bid to keep up with the kids.
For Your Consideration benefits tremendously from the presence of pretty much Guest’s entire repertory company, including Levy as a caterpillar-browed schmoozer and Victor’s agent. Fred Willard with a blonde faux-hawk as the peppily moronic co-anchor of an Entertainment Tonight-style entertainment news show is always going to be funny, and in its early going For Your Consideration has its share of laughs, like when an earnest screenwriter played by Michael McKean argues that you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater because “then you get a wet, critically injured baby.”
But the more For Your Consideration focuses on the feverish competition for Oscars and the way it warps the minds of show-business folks who were never too stable to begin with, the weaker and less convincing it is.
Being a cruel and vengeful God, Guest sees fit to punish most of his characters by denying them the sweet, sweet burst of validation an Oscar nomination would provide. When we last see Callie, for example, she’s screaming her way through a one-woman show, that most exhausted and hackneyed of satirical targets.
Unlike the cult classics that preceded it, For Your Consideration never gets the balance of mean to funny right. It’s too mean and not funny enough, particularly when compared to Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and even previous Fractured Mirror entry The Big Picture, which explored similar thematic territory with a sense of nuance, specificity and realism For Your Consideration lacks.
Incredible triumphs loomed tantalizingly in Levy and O’Hara’s not too distant future in the form of Schitt’s Creek, not to mention a whole lot of awards, but For Your Consideration found some of our most beloved, consistent funny people mired in a state of profound creative exhaustion.
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