等待古夫曼

Hollywood comedy-hyphenate Christopher Guest’s mockumentary WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, his second feature film as a director, pivots around the production of a community musical called “Red, White, and Blaine”, which chronicles the history of the fictive town Blaine, Missouri, to coincide with its 150th anniversary, and is supervised by the off-center director Corky St. Clair (Guest), who purports to have a past in the off-off-off-off-Broadway.

Ostensibly posing as a documentary interviewing Blaine’s manifold townsfolk, from city councilors, UFO experts, to those involved in the musical production, WAITING FOR GUFFMAN is also a jewel of improvisation, the majority of its hilarious lines, dialogue and personal interactions is ad-libbed (though Guest and Eugene Levy nominally take the credits as the scenarists), and delightfully, each member of Guest’s stock company is gung-ho to contribute their own laugh lines into the fold, and the entire film is washed with uncynical ironies, from a pair of travel agents who has never ventured out of the town (save for a sexual organ reduction surgery, no less!), to the town’s geography-challenged founding father, the much plugged stool manufacture (and those who can perform and utter it with a perfect serious face), not to mention the UFO abduction anecdote, a self-claimed abductee (Dooley) recounts that he has been multiply probed.

Taking into account of the film’s highly unsystematic makeup, it is no small feat that Guest covers the whole gamut of producing a stage musical with brisk efficiency and coherence, sequentially, auditions, casting, rehearsals, extra funds solicitation (ending up with a storming-off), Corky’s petulant resign and none-too-tardy comeback, and the final showtime, with the expectancy of the advent of Mr. Guffman, a theater critic from the Big Apple, who might bring the production to Broadway! Everything is effected in cruise control mostly courtesy to the fantastic dramatis personae.

Fred Willard and Catherine O’Hara are sidesplitting as Ron and Sheila Albertson, the genial couple harboring a Hollywood dream, who also have some antics in their sleeves, and with some alcohol under the belts, they are not shy of spilling some saucy beans to their prudish friends; Bob Balaban, as the frustrating school music teacher, goes against the grain of broad comic to emit his more subdued, simmering grievance; there is the inimitable Posey Parker, apart from being a pert sprite, can also elicit our compassion with her casual but unfeigned confession of a small-town gal fantasizing escaping onto a bigger canvas, and Eugene Levy is exceedingly competent as the straight-arrow dentist Allan, whose inner fire as an entertainer is potently triggered by being offered a major part in the musical, and his lazy eye prank is a pure killer.

Still and all, Guest’s superlative impersonation of Corky is another fount of our jouissance, despite of the obvious gay mannerism, and Corky’s overt interest in the mechanic stud Johnny Savage (Keeslar), thankfully the film doesn’t lay it on thick with more concrete developments, the situation of an absent wife alone speaks enough volumes of the unmasked truth.

The resultant musical itself, unsurprisingly, is a down-home, ludicrous parody of Americana’s cracker-barrel banality and wholesome innocuousness (an amusingly jarring synergy with its modern-ish instrumental accompaniment), however, Guest’s savvy mind puts no icing on this kitsch cake, a no-show Mr. Guffman is no savior to deliver the performers from their unfulfilled status quo, but that doesn’t mean they will stop trying, as the end points up soberingly, that is the veritable American spirit one should cleave to, which makes WAITING FOR GUFFMAN several notches above any number of one’s average, campy, feel-good comedies.

referential entries: Guest’s FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION (2006, 6.7/10); Mel Brooks THE PRODUCERS (1967, 7.2/10).