A Mighty Wind film review

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A MIGHTY WIND

After focussing his satirical attentions on amateur dramatics (Waiting For Guffman) and dog owners (Best In Show), Christopher Guest turns to folk music as the subject for his latest 'mockumentary' (a phrase he apparently reviles). A Mighty Wind follows the same formula that began with 1984's sublime This Is Spinal Tap - indeed the three Tap members reappear here as The Folksmen - and although it provides some uproarious moments, the format is becoming a little too predictable and the characters a little too familiar.

It's hardly surprising given that Guest has assembled the same actors and the same method of working With only the rough outline of a script for guidance, the final cut of a little over 90 minutes is culled from more than 60 hours of mostly improvised material. Stringing things together into a cohesive whole is never the main goal, instead the style is best suited to giving the actors a rare opportunity to create their own characters and let them loose. The outcome, like the previous films, is that A Mighty Wind is inhabited by a large and colourful cast all trying (and generally succeeding) to be more eccentric than each other.

The loose plot centers around a memorial concert for the recently deceased legendary music agent Irving Steinbloom. His son Jonathan (Bob Balaban) endeavours to get three of his father's biggest acts back together again on the same stage for the first time in decades. The impossibly wholesome "neuftet", The New Main Street Singers, are led by the husband and wife team of Terry (John Michael Higgins) and Laurie Bohner (Jane Lynch), who deny their mystical worshiping of colour borders on cultism, though Laurie doesn't deny her porn past in such memorable films as Not So Tiny Tim.

Guest's films make liberal use of interviews. The one involving The Folksmen (Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean) reminiscing about their early years has echoes of the three's trivial exchanges in Spinal Tap as they talk about how their early recording career was hampered by the fact that there was no hole in the center of their first record. "If you punched a hole in them, you'd have a good time," they insightfully point out.

The final group, and the stars of the show, are Mitch and Mickey, a duo whose signature kiss belied an unrequited love that drove Mitch (Eugene Levy) to a breakdown and then drugs, and Mickey (Catherine O'Hara) into the arms of a catheter salesman with an interest in model trains.