One of the reasons the mockumentary work of Christopher Guest works as well as it does is because he’s so talented at knowing what kind of windows to peer through. From the dog show weirdos of Best in Show to the small-town theater folk of Waiting for Guffman all the way into the Guest-starring (but not Guest-directed) look into British heavy metal, This is Spinal Tap (which, to be fair, is incredibly Guestian in nature), the windows he finds are those that look into bizarre pockets of subculture where the most compelling oddballs dwell. What makes him successful, though, is that his movies never feel mean-spirited, and the passions of the characters are never mocked — the joke is always that these people are each their own flavor of bonkers.
Though Best in Show wasn’t a blockbuster, it was plenty successful — it was a critical smash and made a healthy profit, meaning that Guest would survive to make another film about another group of eccentrics. After the dog show had finished, Guest decided to reach back nearly 20 years — not to Spinal Tap, but to his own reaction to Spinal Tap. In 1984, when Guest and Spinal Tap co-star Harry Shearer were part of the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” and when Michael McKean came to host an episode, the obvious move was for the three to reprise their then-recent roles as the British rockers. Instead, they ran in the opposite direction, appearing as the folk trio The Folksmen, a nod to the uptick in popularity of folk music acts at the time. They were fiendishly funny and bone dry, their “freshly-reunited band with previous bad blood, but it’s a folk act” conceit almost too fleshed-out. In a way, they (like all characters in Guest’s films) felt somehow real, like the trio had entered the most milquetoast fugue state imaginable. Who wouldn’t want to see those guys in a whole movie? (Worth mentioning: in the film’s epilogue, it’s revealed that Shearer’s character has decided to transition, though surprisingly this fact isn’t treated with cruelty— a rarity for 2003.)
The Folksmen gave Guest the doorway he needed into the world of folk music, which allowed A Mighty Wind to come into being. The set-up is simple: after the death of folk music producer Irving Steinbloom, three of the bands he worked with put aside any intra-band bad blood and stage a memorial concert in his honor. Joining the Folksmen are two other acts: the borderline-cultlike neuftet (that’s nine members!) The New Main Street Singers and the (now long-divorced) husband-wife duo Mitch & Mickey. The former is a cast of wild characters unto itself, though the show is easily stolen by Jane Lynch and John Michael Higgins, who are also founders of Witches in Nature’s Colors (WINC), a witch’s coven that worships the spectrum of visible light. Higgins, forever jockeying for the title of Funniest Person in the Room, gives us one of the most hysterical lines in the whole movie: “There had been abuse in my family, but it was mostly musical in nature. My father used to lock me away in a room with nothing but the Percy Faith recording of Bim! Bam! Boom! and then send me to bed with nothing but dessert.”
One key change between Best in Show and A Mighty Wind is that, though the chemistry between powerhouse onscreen couple Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara was outstanding in the previous mock-doc, that film was lacking something. A Mighty Wind course-corrects by having the pair serve as Mitch & Mickey, a divorced folk-duo who serve as the warm, gooey emotional center. The chemistry between Levy and O’Hara (not to mention their versatility) is such that they’re able to cultivate it even with the most awkward pairings around, and that’s the case with the level-headed Mickey and the neurotic, high-strung, awkward Mitch. While she bounced back from the dissolution of their marriage, Mitch went in the opposite direction, his increasingly-dark album titles, one literally called Cry for Help (with a straightjacketed Mitch in a padded cell on the cover). Guest has never been one to really lean into the romantic, but underneath the silliness of their lives lies a delicate, complicated love that really feels like it spans decades. If you’re in the right headspace, the scene where Mitch returns from his ill-advised walkabout with a rose for Mickey will leave you choked up — and if it doesn’t, their shared kiss during “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow” at the film’s climax sure will.
Of course, any conversation about A Mighty Wind wouldn’t be complete without talking about all of the characters that aren’t folk musicians. The films of Christopher Guest wouldn’t be nearly as good without their bit characters and tertiary goofballs, and this one doesn’t skimp on the silly. It’s hard to say who is the biggest scene stealer: is it the Fieri-haired Fred Willard, forever blundering unbidden into scenes and attempting to cram his meaningless catchphrases (have fun having “Hey! Wha’ happened?!” stuck in your head for the rest of your life) into every conversation? Is it the incomparable Jennifer Coolidge, who blurts out fried gold like “Thank God for the model trains. If they didn’t have the model trains they wouldn’t have gotten the idea for the big trains!” without even seeming to understand how fucking funny she is? What about Mickey’s catheter salesman husband Leonard Crabbe (Jim Piddock), who won’t hesitate to launch into talking about his profession at dinner? Really, though, the true winners are producer Steinbloom’s son Jonathan Steinbloom and venue manager Lawrence Turpin (Bob Balaban and Michael Hitchcock, respectively). We watch as Jonathan tours the venue before the concert, expressing ignorant concern for everything from the stage props to the “hanging vines” of a flower arrangement in the lobby. Balaban’s perma-dryness mixes flawlessly with a series of inane concerned demands made of Hitchcock’s beleaguered-but-highly-competent professional, a dynamic that ratchets up until he (entirely unscripted) slaps the top of Balaban’s head out of frustration.
An article just as long as this one could be written about the soundtrack. Guest and all of the actors who wrote songs for the film could have simply written the songs included in the movie and phoned in those that appear in snippets, but it operates as a surprisingly thorough journey through the tropes of hokey folk music, from a rousing number about The Wreck of the Old 97 (“Blood on the Coal”) and a bouncy Bible song (“The Good Book Song”) to a Civil War ballad (“The Ballad of Bobby and June”) and a fully racist calypso song (“Loco Man”). Though all of the Folksmen and New Main Street Singers songs are fun, each of Mitch & Mickey’s songs are truly beautiful and transcend any of the goofiness that we’re supposed to get from most of the other music of the film.
Around the time A Mighty Wind came out, Shearer summed up its comedy rather succinctly: “they take themselves seriously, but they have no right to.” In some ways, he’s right, these musicians are totally ridiculous — they’re often unoriginal enough that one band has to go into damage control mode when another band adds the same song to their repertoire. But, if the heart-rousing group performance of “A Mighty Wind” that ends the film shows us anything, it’s that even at their most ridiculous, the musicians of these groups — just like competition-level dog owners, heavy metal bands, actors both veteran and amateur, and mascots that populate the wide world of Christopher Guest — are far more talented and worthy of taking themselves than Shearer, or many who think like him, seems to think.
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