WAITING FOR GUFFMAN
A Film Review by Brian Takeshita
Rating: *** out of ****
"You know that saying about how if you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes? Well, with some hard work and determination, I believe we can get that down to three or four." So says the mayor of the small town of Blaine, Missouri, the setting for Christopher Guest's WAITING FOR GUFFMAN. This line, delivered absolutely deadpan by comedian/actor Larry Miller, sets the tone for the film: Ridiculous lines delivered by characters who are totally serious. The film is presented as a documentary which opens up as the Blaine City Council prepares for the town's sesquicentennial celebration. They stand around a sandtable mock-up of the town square and position little figurines as one security-minded councilmember suggests putting snipers on the rooftops just in case things get "out of hand".
Soon afterwards, we are introduced to Corky St. Claire (Christopher Guest), a stereotypically effeminate musical theater director who, after finding only limited success in The Big Apple, moved to Blaine to produce community plays featuring local talent. For Blaine's celebration, Corky is putting together a production which depicts the history of the town, from it's founding by westward-bound settlers who thought the Missouri River was the Pacific Ocean, to its boomtown days of footstool production (earning Blaine the title of "Stool Capitol of the United States"), to its purported visit by aliens prior to Roswell, New Mexico.
We are introduced to a number of remarkably funny characters through the audition held for Corky's big musical. There's Ron and Sheila Albertson (Fred Willard and Catherine O'Hara), who run a local travel agency, but have never been outside Blaine (well, except once when Ron had to go to the next town for surgery). They've caught the acting bug and have appeared in Corky's previous efforts, including a musical version of BACKDRAFT, where the audience had to be evacuated because of the smoke. There's also dentist Alan Pearl (Eugene Levy, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Guest), whose singing audition is one of the funniest moments in the film. Finally, there's Libby Mae Brown (Parker Posey), a Dairy Queen employee who is trying to create a soft serve concoction to top the Blizzard. Each displays a severe lack of talent, but Corky sits there watching and smiling like Ed Wood, believing that he's found diamonds in the rough.
Guest and Levy have created characters who are not outrageously comical, but instead are just left of center. They are normal enough so that you might know these characters in real life, but odd enough so that they make us laugh. Indeed, their behavior is so regular-life natural that it adds to the documentary feel, and it is exactly this documentary style that makes WAITING FOR GUFFMAN so funny. As an audience, we're used to seeing documentaries made about serious or interesting subjects, but we're not used to finding them humorous. Additionally, what's played out for the camera is by all means supposed to be serious; the documentary premise sets up a gritty view of people who are basically living their lives. The fact that their actions are laughable is lost on them, but is totally our gain. It's as if we're in on some kind of joke that they're not privy to, and in the crudest sense, we're laughing at them, not with them. Sounds terrible, but it's a wonderful vehicle for comedy.
There's no character development in this movie, and there really doesn't need to be, since the paper-thin quality of the characters is what makes their inclusion in a documentary so laughable. We watch as they try to learn the dance steps, lines, and lyrics and we can't help but be amazed at how inept they are. We watch open-mouthed as they fantasize about taking the show to Broadway when they learn a talent scout from a New York production company will be attending the performance (his name is Guffman, and if you're familiar with Beckett, you already know what will happen). They end up pretty much on a continuation of the paths they started before the entire Blaine musical experience, not seeming to have learned a damn thing. And we love it.
Christopher Guest was one of the stars of Rob Reiner's THIS IS SPINAL TAP, a hilariously innovative "documentary" about a fictional heavy metal rock group, and there is no doubt where Guest learned the craft for directing WAITING FOR GUFFMAN. While Guest uses a tamer group of subjects for his film, and stylistically differs somewhat by his choices to utilize longer scenes and leave the film unnarrated, for example, one can definitely see the influences from his experience with Reiner 12 years previously (has it really been that long?). It is a credit to Guest that he learned well and used his knowledge to produce a film that is as original as it is an homage to the film which broke new ground for comedy.
Review posted August 3, 1998
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