Unwelcome Guest

Guest may, indeed, be a comic genius. As a performer on stage in the 1970s, on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s, and in his own films, he has breathed wonderfully detailed life into so many different characters with so many different accents that it’s clear he could have been the American Peter Sellers if he had given himself the chance. And he’s smart enough to surround himself with other comic actors who are nearly as good as he is and make him look even better.

But the movies he writes and directs aren’t very good, and the reason they’re not very good is that he directs them.

The first movie in the Guest series, Waiting for Guffman, is about a community theater production in a small Missouri town and the madness that ensues when the ensemble hears a Broadway producer is coming to see their show. It was followed by Best in Show, about dog owners who bring their purebred pets to compete in a nationally televised canine competition. A Mighty Wind came next, in which aged folk singers famous for 15 minutes during the roots-music craze of the early 1960s gather for a reunion concert at New York’s Town Hall. And now there’s For Your Consideration, which follows a bunch of has-been and never-was actors and writers making a small independent feature that inexplicably becomes the subject of Oscar buzz in Hollywood.

The case for Guest’s greatness rests on the undeniably fantastic flights of brilliance in each of these films– peerlessly absurd and original comedy bits that emerge from the lengthy improvisational process that precedes the making of the movies and are then teased into full-fledged life by Guest and his co-writer, Eugene Levy.

For example: The very nervous concert promoter of A Mighty Wind recalls how his mother was so overprotective she made him wear a safety helmet to play chess. One of the dog owners in Best in Show is a ditz in her late 30s who is married to a wheelchair-bound man who appears to be nearing 100. “Leslie and I have an amazing relationship and it’s very physical, he still pushes all my buttons,” she says. “People say ‘Oh, but he’s so much older than you,’ and you know what, I’m the one having to push him away. We have so much in common, we both love soup and snow peas, we love the outdoors, and talking and not talking. We could not talk or talk forever and still find things to not talk about.”

The programming director of PBS in A Mighty Wind is a blonder-than-blond Scandinavian guy named Lars Olfen who speaks only in show-business Yiddishisms when he recounts seeing a folk concert in his youth: “This is the emes: When I heard I got these tickets to the Folksmen, I let out a geshrai, and I’m running around like a vildeh chaya, right into the theater, in the front row! So we’ve got the schpilkes!”

Guest loves old-time Jewish humor. A dentist in Waiting for Guffman (played by the peerless Levy) revels in his family’s showbiz past, with a grandfather in the Yiddish Theatre whose claim to fame was introducing the immortal song “Bubbie Loves a Kishka.” In For Your Consideration, the movie being made is called Home for Purim, about a southern Jewish family after World War II. “Oy gevalt! What have Ah done?” intones the matriarch when she learns her daughter has found a “good strong man” named Mary Pat.

Guest loves gay humor too, and not just because it inspired his own amazing performance as Corky, the theater director in Guffman who talks incessantly of a “wife” whom his fellow townsfolk never actually see. Guest constantly makes gleeful sport of gay, lesbian, and “transgendered” people throughout his films. At the end of A Mighty Wind, the basso singer in a folksinging trio announces he has decided to live as a woman and, in cocktail dress and Streisand ’60s wig in the middle of a performance at an Indian casino in Upstate New York, sings the lowest three notes of a song called “Eat at Joe’s.” In Best in Show, a character informs us that she publishes a magazine called American Bitch that “focuses on the issues of the lesbian pure-bred dog owner.”

What Guest doesn’t love are the people who inhabit his movies, and there’s the problem. They are rubes and morons, talentless and ridiculous, with almost nothing to commend them. That view of humankind–the “Lord, what fools these mortals be” view–can be a fine basis for comedy. The problem is that nobody on earth is quite as stupid as the characters in Guest’s movies.

Take the publicist who is promoting the movie in For Your Consideration. He’s a toupee-wearing buffoon who has never heard of the phenomenon of websites dedicated to movies in production. “The Internet?” he says. “That’s the thing with email, right?” Later, he refers to it as “The World Wide Interweb.”

It sounds funny, but it’s so broad and off the mark that it leaves a sour taste in the mouth. There’s no such thing as a movie publicist in 2006 who is ignorant of the Internet. Similarly, no American movie made in the past 50 years has been anywhere near as dreadful or amateurish as Home for Purim–nor, for that matter, has any small-town theater production been as sheerly rancid as the show in Waiting for Guffman. They’re so bad that there’s almost nothing funny about them. You’re embarrassed watching them unfold. You wait for a single person somewhere who will say, “What do you people think you’re doing?”

The fact that nobody in Guest’s universe is clear-eyed enough to understand the wretchedness of the proceedings reveals the true weakness of his movies. Guest belittles his characters by making them believe the work they are doing is wonderful when we can see that it’s lousy in a hundred different ways. He has little or no fondness for them. He creates them to look down in contempt on them, and invites us to do the same.

Now consider the movie that made Guest’s career as an auteur possible–This Is Spinal Tap, the semi-improvised 1984 comedy in which he starred along with two members of his repertory company, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean. Spinal Tap is also a portrait of a showbiz calamity–the final tour of a lousy, second-rank heavy-metal band. The band’s members are as stupid as the people in Guest’s movies, and just as delusional. But it’s entirely credible that they once had a successful act, whereas nobody in Guest’s movies has ever been any good. And there is also a real sweetness to them. They’re dim but well meaning, and all they want to do is entertain people, even if they don’t really know how.

The difference between Spinal Tap and the Guest films is that Guest didn’t direct Spinal Tap. Rob Reiner did, and it was Reiner who brought the large-hearted sensibility that makes Spinal Tap such a unique and wonderful creation. As a director, Guest has replaced Reiner’s humanity with a witheringly contemptuous eye–and therefore, at their core, his movies are far less comic than they are misanthropic, and in the end they are as pleasurable as spending 90 minutes with a clever misanthrope can be.

Even as they provoke laughter and admiration, you can’t wait to get away.

John Podhoretz is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.