Christopher Guest’s latest keeps the same cast of self-important characters as his recent mockumentaries A Mighty Wind and Best in Show, but in For Your Consideration he presents them in a traditional fictional narrative rather than in documentary style. Guest plays the director of what is clearly a terrible movie, “Home for Purim”, about a southern American Jewish family in World War II dealing with a dying mother (played by Catherine O’Hara) and a lesbian daughter (played by Parker Posey). Bob Balaban and Michael McKean play the screenwriters. The premise of the movie is that an internet rumor gets started hinting that O’Hara’s character, Marilyn Hack (get it?), might get an Oscar nomination for her performance in “Home for Purim”. This rumor starts before the movie has finished filming and therefore before anyone with any sense has seen it. The rumor mill picks up a life of its own as the male lead, Victor Allan Miller (Harry Shearer), also starts to get Oscar buzz and the two make the rounds of the L.A. morning shows and Hollywood gossip shows.
Consideration generates some laughs from the preposterous behavior of its characters and from the absurdity of the movie they are making. “Home for Purim” features deep South accents mixed with bad acting and reading from the book of Esther along with heavy use of the Purim “gragger” or noisemaker as part of the tradition of this holiday. The movie’s publicist has only barely heard of the “World Wide Interweb”, Victor Allan Miller is auditioning for radio commercials in Oregon while filming “Purim”, and Marilyn Hack is best known for her portrayal of a cross-eyed blind prostitute twenty years ago. It is so far beyond credible that “Purim” would ever get made, let alone generate Oscar buzz, that it keeps Consideration from rising above the level of a simple exercise in mockery. In Guest’s Waiting for Guffman it was much easier to accept characters in a quiet midwestern town dreaming of fifteen minutes of fame than it is to imagine in Consideration that the entire Hollywood movie culture has simultaneously lost its collective mind. It would have been both funnier and more engaging to have this be about actors with at least some talent and a movie that is not laughably bad. The clips we see from the other Oscar-worthy movies in the world of Consideration are also atrocious. Perhaps Guest is trying to send-up all self-important actors and filmmakers. If so, it would have been more effective to have his actors be a bit less ridiculous.