Waiting for Guffman (1996)
(On Cable TV, September 2022) Look, I know that Waiting for Guffman is dearly beloved. Christopher Guest’s filmography is incomplete without it; it stands on numerous “best comedies” lists, and it’s a not-infrequent reference even twenty-five years later. But I’m more of a Best in Show person—and when it comes to comedy, I’d rather watch something tightly written than improv that goes all over the place. I also suspect that some of the clichés on which the film is built—which is to say: the backwardness of small-town America—don’t hold quite as true today. Still, that’s what we’ve got: In celebrating a historical milestone, a very small Midwestern town puts on a musical and everyone involved is convinced that they’re one New York agent (the titular Guffman) away from becoming rich and famous. Of course, there’s a quite a gulf in-between their talent and their self-assessment of that talent and that’s where much of the comedy comes in. Guest himself plays a not-very-closeted flamboyant man with Broadway experience trying to orchestrate the show. Around him are various townspeople with delusions of grandeur, small-minded folks not quite grasping what the musical is trying to do, and an assortment of just-normal-people swept up in the craziness. To be fair, Waiting for Guffman is steadily amusing—with people such as Eugene Levy, Bob Balaban, Catherine O’Hara and Fred Willard in the cast, it’s hard not to have at least a smirk throughout. But Guest’s much-vaunted improvisational approach (leading to multi-hours assembly cuts that need to be whittled to a much-shorter final film) is a specific taste, and there’s often the impression that the film is going in several directions at once, only to be reluctantly led down a specific path. One thing that may or may not help is the utterly deadpan nature of the comedy: while that’s an impressive alignment of improvisational material (in that no one is obviously mugging for the camera), it takes a specific comedic wavelength to be in-tune with what’s going on. Save for the visually ridiculous musical sequences at the end (some of them surprisingly snappy), there’s little here to suggest at first glance that you’re watching a comedy—you have to pay attention to decode the jokes. It may also be a case of hype exceeding the material—I expected nothing from Best in Show and laughed through the entire thing, whereas I was expecting much from Waiting for Guffman and merely chuckled a few times. It’s certainly not a bad movie—but I’m allowed to pick other guest films as favourites.
