Film Review: A Mighty Wind

A Mighty Wind

Warner Brothers

Anyone who sits through A Mighty Wind, writer/director Christopher Guest’s latest entry in the mockumentary subgenre, will be tempted to make comparisons to Guest’s earlier work, This Is Spinal Tap. The classic parody of perpetually witless hard rockers finds its complement in both music and volume with Wind, which focuses not on the disaster-prone tour of a brainless metal band, but a disaster-prone tribute concert in memory of a late, legendary folk music producer. The premise is just the sort of odd episode that Guest has mined so skillfully in the past, but this time around he maintains little of the comic consistency that he has previously captured, settling instead for ham-handed punch-lines and tonally confused subplots. Guest’s distinctive mockumentary technique is not yet stale, but this latest creation arrives disappointingly undercooked.

The film centers around the three folk groups who have reunited for the concert. The most prominent of the three is Mitch and Mickey, a hopelessly maudlin duo played by Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, who sports one of the more grating speech impediments in recent memory. Another band, the Folksmen, is comprised of the same actors playing the same instruments they butchered in Spinal Tap, but reinvented as balding, anachronistic folk singers. The script makes a serious mistake in under-using the Folksmen, replacing the genuine tension of their metal alter egos with some inane squabbling over set lists. Rounding out the collection are the New Main Street Singers, whose leaders practice some sort of color-based religion that is far too ludicrous to be amusing.

The cast is also dotted with the standard ensemble of excessively colorful characters, played by Guest’s resident troupe of oddities. The standout is once again Fred Willard, whose offensively boorish announcer in 2000’s Best in Show amassed a fair share of critical praise. Here he plays the equally ignorant manager of Hi-Class Productions, who constantly relives the days when he supposedly hosted a game show called “Wha’ Happened? Willard never fails to produce a chuckle every time he attempts to incorporate the show’s titular catchphrase into his everyday speech. Michael Hitchcock also steals scenes as the ever-exasperated manager of the Town Hall where the concert takes place.

There are certainly big laughs in A Mighty Wind. When Mickey’s model train-enthusiast husband asks Mitch whether or not he likes trains, Mitch replies, perplexed as always, “I took the bus.” But more often than not, the jokes are tired or run thin very quickly. Ed Begley, Jr. plays a Swede with deep Jewish roots, an idea that is only half-baked but is awkwardly employed several times. Even more unsettling is the uneven tone set by the relationship between Mitch and Mickey. While their genuine romantic tension is carefully developed, it is far too out of place in a comedy of this nature. An attempt at resolution is tacked on at movie’s end, but offers little satisfaction to the viewers, who have emotionally invested too much in these two characters to deserve a cop-out conclusion. This is perhaps the film’s greatest blunder; it has too many elements of a movie that it is not trying to be. Emotionally the film may pack a wallop, but comically, it’s nothing more than a soft blow.

A Mighty Wind screens at 1:40, 4:20, 6:55 and 9:30 p.m. beginning Wednesday at Kendall Square Cinema.