PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW

Few things are more disappointing than watching one of your favorite comedians struggling through an off night. So it goes with Christopher Guest's latest feature For Your Consideration, which purports to satirize Hollywood's most sacred time of the year: Oscar season. The director's usual ensemble of actors are all present and accounted for, from Eugene Levy and Fred Willard to Parker Posey and Catherine O'Hara, but from the beginning, something doesn't feel quite right about their latest romp. The characters are sketchier, the situations more contrived and the laughs are fewer and far between, particularly compared to the non-stop hilarity of Guest's previous films.

The Oscar hopeful at the center of Consideration is a microbudget drama called Home for Purim, a Tennessee Williams-esque story about a family of Southern Jews who experience tears and tragedy during the titular holiday. Right off the bat, Guest is asking the audience to suspend a fair amount of disbelief, since there's no way a movie like this would ever receive the greenlight from a Hollywood studio. Sadly, Purim is no Red, White and Blaine, the hilarious play performed in the last act of Waiting for Guffman. Perhaps realizing this, Guest wisely focuses on what happens after this little film acquires some major Oscar buzz. Never mind that this rumor was only mentioned in passing on a random Internet movie site—it is immediately treated as gospel by everyone connected to Home for Purim, from the actors to the producers to the executives. Suddenly, the film's past-their-prime leads Marylin Hack (O'Hara) and Victor Allan Miller (Harry Shearer) are on the chat-show circuit while studio boss Martin Gibb (Ricky Gervais) concocts ways to make the movie more "accessible" to a mass audience (hint: by the time the film hits theaters, the central holiday ain't Purim anymore.)

This isn't the first time Guest has tweaked the hand that feeds him—his underrated feature directorial debut The Big Picture was also an inside-the-beltway spoof of La-La-Land. But that film had a firmer grasp on what it was satirizing. Consideration is a much broader comedy and as a result, its jabs don't feel as sharp. The film is also hurt by Guest's decision to move away from the mockumentary format. It's understandable that he'd want to try something new, but that approach is better suited to his brand of improvisational humor. For one thing, it allowed him to just let the camera run thus giving the actors plenty of time to play off each other. There are fewer of these long takes in Consideration and that winds up throwing off the cast's comic rhythm.

Still, the movie does feature one fully-formed comic creation: O'Hara's Marylin Hack. Marylin is one of those actresses of a certain age who made a splash many years ago but never went on to become a boldfaced name. She has almost accepted the fact that she's in the twilight of her career...until the idea of winning an Oscar is planted in her head. Now desperate to make a late-inning run at stardom, Marylin starts dressing in cleavage-baring outfits and acquires the frozen smile of intensive Botox use. Always one of Guest's most valuable players, O'Hara turns in what may be her best performance ever here. Funny and fearless, she's the one thing about For Your Consideration that's actually worthy of an Oscar nomination.

—Ethan Alter