WAITING FOR GUFFMAN
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Sony Classics/Castle Rock) Starring: Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Catherine O'Hara, Parker Posey, Bob Balaban. Screenplay: Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy. Producer: Karen Murphy. Director: Christopher Guest. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 83 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
The reason inspired satire is so rare nowadays is that people have been given a warped perception of what satire is. The popular culture -- fed by "Saturday Night Live," David Letterman and even political pundits -- has created the notion that irony, sarcasm and satire are interchangeable, and that there is something inherently hip about ridicule as a spectator sport. But it takes no imagination to savage someone or something you despise; the best satire in any medium has been born of affection, from people with a gift for pointing out the negative while recognizing the positive. THIS IS SPINAL TAP, the best comedy of the 1980s, was a brilliant satire of the excesses of rock and roll which also respected the commitment of the artists to their work. WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, a comedy from TAP alum Christopher Guest, is a more uneven effort, but it is at its funniest skewering small-town America in all its cockeyed optimism.
WAITING FOR GUFFMAN is set in fictional Blaine, Missouri, a peaceful little town preparing to celebrate its 150th birthday. Part of that celebration will be an original musical production called "Red, White and Blaine," and it is placed in the hands of New York theater expatriate Corky St. Clair (Christopher Guest). Corky has big plans for the big event, and builds a cast including local community theater veterans Ron (Fred Willard) and Sheila Albertson (Catherine O'Hara) and first-time performers Dr. Allan Pearl (Eugene Levy) and Libby Mae Brown (Parker Posey). The production faces crises great and small as the sesquicentennial approaches, but even more exciting than the show itself is the prospect of a visit from a New York producer named Mort Guffman, who may offer to take the show to Broadway.
Publicity for WAITING FOR GUFFMAN is emphasizing the SPINAL TAP connection by describing Guest as "the lead guitarist of Spinal Tap," but I don't think that comparison does GUFFMAN any favors. Yes, it is similarly filmed in a faux documentary style, and derives a similar off-beat energy from its largely improvised script. However, there are fewer outrageous high points, largely the result of a less inherently outrageous milieu. The more you expect a middle-American SPINAL TAP, the more time you might spend waiting for the inevitable disasters in the play which turn out to be not so inevitable after all.
It may take sitting through all of "Red, White and Blaine" before it becomes clear that WAITING FOR GUFFMAN is not going to be a parade of incompetence, though Guest (who co-wrote the story with co-star Levy) does have fun with the cloistered perspectives of his characters. The Albertsons, who are travel agents by day, turn out never to have left the state of Missouri themselves; a reported alien visitation in 1946 is so much a part of Blaine's history that it makes its way into the pageant as an accepted fact. Most memorably, nobody in the town seems to notice that Corky is as stereotypically homosexual a human being as has ever walked the earth. Guest has taken some heat for his swishy portrayal, but I think such criticism misses the point. Everyone watching the film understands that Corky is supposed to be gay, but no one _in_ the film understands it. Gay men simply are not part of their world, so no one thinks twice about why they have never seen Corky's "wife" Bonnie, or about his exaggerated mannerisms being anything but "theatrical."
The real subject of WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, however, isn't merely how narrow the world-view of Blaine's residents may be, but how the residents involved in the production respond to a whiff of big city show-biz. For Corky, "Red, White and Blaine" is his chance to return to the big time; for Dr. Pearl, a latent comedic legend in his own mind, it is a spark of excitement in his otherwise monotonous life. You may spend much of WAITING FOR GUFFMAN waiting for "Red, White and Blaine" to be terrible, but it isn't terrible. The orchestra, conducted with intense pride by the high school music teacher (Bob Balaban) sounds pretty good, the songs (written by Guest and his fellow Tap-ers Michael McKean and Harry Shearer) are silly but hum-able, and the actors are amateurs who give the show all they've got. It is simply ridiculous, of course, that a show like this could ever go to Broadway, but the performers are too wonderfully naive to recognize that fact. WAITING FOR GUFFMAN is occasionally sluggish through its middle half hour, and hardly the non-stop riot SPINAL TAP was; it also treats its characters with far more good-humored respect than you might expect. Guest understands that it is possible to laugh at people and still love them, and that fine satire can be achieved with the poke of a finger as well as a sledgehammer.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 show-me states: 7.
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