For Your Consideration
Review by Fritz Esker
Performers, by nature, tend to be insecure. One of the best examples of this was Sally Field’s infamous Oscar acceptance speech where she blurted out, “You like me! You really like me!” That need to be liked is what drives much of For Your Consideration, the new comedy from Christopher Guest (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show).
The film opens with a seemingly lackluster melodrama, Home for Purim, being shot in Hollywood. Things seem run-of-the-mill until one day, an Internet movie site speculates that the film’s has-been lead actress (Catherine O’Hara) will get an Oscar nomination. Things snowball from there and soon everyone involved in the film is caught up in Oscar fever.
While the film is again mostly improvised from an outline by Christopher Guest (playing the director of Home for Purim) and Eugene Levy (here playing a slimy agent), Guest eschews his normal docudrama style for a more straightforward narrative, but so many scenes involve the participants being interviewed by celebrity journalists (two of which are hilariously played by Fred Willard and Jane Lynch), it still has mostly the same feel.
Even though most of Guest’s work involves people whose hopes are not fulfilled, For Your Consideration features an even more pervasive sense of sadness than usual for a Guest film. This is especially true in the second half when the film’s cast is nearly salivating with anticipation over the possibility of Oscar nomination. As the actors viewed as most likely to receive the nominations, O’Hara, Harry Shearer, and Parker Posey do very strong character work here, but the quality of their work will probably be overlooked because they’re in a comedy. They get terrific support from the rest of the cast as well. Like any good improvisational, each actor gets a moment to shine.
Glancing at For Your Consideration’s reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (an Internet-based compilation of critics’ reviews from around the country), it has fallen just barely on the negative (on the site, known as “rotten”) side. My best guess for this is that Guest and co. were so brilliant in Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show that people expect them to be that good every time, which is an unrealistic expectation. For Your Consideration may not be Guffman or Show, but it still an intelligent, frequently funny comedy that has a much stronger emotional undercurrent than most. In other words, see it.