For Your Consideration

There's something about For Your Consideration that just doesn't work. Christopher Guest films are usually immense fun combining quirky characters with mundane situations such as dog shows and community theatre. The acting troupe that appears in them is also universally excellent at both comic acting and improvisation.

With For Your Consideration we have a slightly higher concept for the setting, Hollywood, and in particular the making of a shoddy film that has Oscar buzz connected to it. As for the characters, most are pretty ordinary. There are no Gerry Flecks with his two left feet in For Your Consideration. Rather there's a collection of journeyman actors, the older ones never that good at their craft and bitter and disappointed that their dreams never quite came true, the younger ones clearly starting out on that same path. The other characters are given so little time that even if there is quirky potential, Guest's awful director Jay Berman, John Michael Higgin's clearly unstable Corey Taft, it ultimately ends up unfulfilled.

Another problem lies in that some of the best comic performers in the group are left with minimal screen time. Jennifer Coolidge, Jim Piddock, Ed Begley Jr. and Michael McKean are barely seen, Piddock and McKean's characters are utterly forgettable, while Begley gets left with the gay makeup artist, a one-note, lazy creation. In Whitney Coolidge has to play the same character she did in Best In Show and A Mighty Wind, so while there are some excellent moments from her, we've seen it all before.

Thankfully there's the, what Guest calls, the "Willard Factor". Fred Willard again steals the show as the presenter of an E!-type programme, along with the wonderful Jane Lynch. These two are such expert performers that they play off of each other brilliantly. Their scenes are the funniest of the movie. Also with the more serious storyline about jaded actors having their hopes raised by internet buzz Catherine O'Hara, Harry Shearer and Parker Posey are all excellent. Much had been made about the casting of Ricky Gervais, but he is completely forgettable thanks to, as he admits himself, being poor with improvisation. the inspired casting of a British stand-up comes in the form of Nina Conti. She's only in the film about three minutes, but thanks to the fact that she is playing a weather girl with a monkey puppet, which is actually her stand-up act, she injects the bizarre so obviously missing from the film. She is a riot because she's allowed to do her own thing. In the deleted scenes on the DVD she is given two scenes where she does just that to an even greater extent than she does in the film. The second is about five minutes of her just performing with the monkey puppet to camera. It's easily the funniest thing on the whole package.

And it is in these deleted scenes the real problem with For Your Consideration is brought to the forefront. They turn out to be funnier than pretty much anything actually in the film. The reason for this is that like previous films from Christopher Guest the performers are allowed to just let go. He turns the camera on and they improvise. Too often during the actual film this does not happen. It's telling that Guest claims to have spent a year editing For Your Consideration. The result is that the film is too tight. Guest's movies tend to benefit from being loose affairs, allowing the performers room to create, this is evident with the success of Guest influenced Knocked Up. It appears that Guest has tried too hard with For Your Consideration. Fair play to him for maybe having the desire to do something different but this is not a big enough step away from his other stuff, rather it just plays like a mis-step version of the usual type of film he makes. As it stands For Your Consideration just isn't funny enough.