Review: "A Mighty Wind"

 Oct 6 2003

Hello Mr. Harry Shearer, 

Just saw DVD of "A Mighty Wind." Funny, righty right. You funny in it, as were all Credibility Gap, Second City etc. improv vets, end obligatory disarming compliment.

And, yes, Chris Guest is very funny man, yes of course. But, as I think Mort Sahl (or Mort Sahl as quoted by Albert Goldman) once said about Lenny Bruce, didn't hit it out of the park.

Now that I convince you I random psychotic in email ether or perhaps doing bad Peter Sellars imitation of Chinaman, here are my criticisms:

1) If you're going to satirize something, satirize it.

Guest is excellent in the clinches of human interaction, Fielding-style ridiculousness and cracks in facade of presentation of self. But when your target is something like folk music, you can't entirely ignore the big picture in favor of the comedy of small human moments.

Specifically: the large extent to which folk musicians sang in favor of civil rights & against the Vietnam war.

It's a bit gutless to gloss that over with glittering generalities and not get to the heart of it. Say, a folky who, Bob Roberts style, had decided that the Vietnam war was a GOOD thing and started singing pro-Nixon, pro-bombing songs to the excoriation of his peers. Or something.

2) Bob Dylan, or conscious lack thereof. The comedy of his rejection of folk messiah status and hurt reaction of that community. The comedy (as Arlo has pointed out) of Bob making more success, at least initially, following in footsteps of Woody Guthrie than Woody Gurthrie's kid did. The comedy of that whole Joan Baez/Dylan soapopera deal.

One throwaway scene of one concert promoter going up to iron gates of, say, Elliot Milton's palatial estate spouting optimistic asides to the camera of how the original troubadour of folk would of course want to be part of this event -- only to be set upon by dogs -- would've been enough.

3) Guest forgets that the camera is another character. Should've been at least SOME reference that, supposedly, a documentary crew was filming all this. Characters turning to camera and saying "Could you turn that off" or little jump-cuts in the interview sections indicating something's been edited out.

4) Levy's performance was a little over-the-top. It would've been funnier if, at the end, now that he'd gotten his ex-wife out of his system, his character had been entirely lucid, had his act entirely together, and was a roaring success.