Directed by
Christopher Guest
119 minutes
Rated M
Reviewed by
Sharon Hurst
For Your Consideration
Synopsis: Jay Berman (Christopher Guest) is a first-time feature director. He decides to direct a small boutique film, generally aimed at Jewish audiences, called "Home for Purim", which is set around a dying matriarch in the deep south of American gathering her family around her for the Holy Day. The film stars now-faded veteran Marilyn Hack (Catherine O’Hara), Victor Miller (Harry Shearer), who is now only seen in a frankfurter suit on TV ads, and glamorous Callie Webb (Parker Posey). As shooting progresses, an internet-generated rumour starts up that the film’s stars may be in line for an Oscar. And suddenly the small film and everyone’s aspirations are aiming for the stars!Christopher Guest is renowned for his mock-docs, from his iconic 1984 hit This is Spinal Tap which successfully parodied the hair metal band phenomenon to most recently A Mighty Wind (2003) lampooning the 1960s folk era. His films all tend to feature the same actors, notably Eugene Levy, who here plays talent agent, Morley Orfkin, whilst Bob Balaban is one of the script-writing team, Phillip Koontz, who is mortified when his original script is “tweaked” and Fred Willard (surely a nominee for Best Bad Hair) is one of the funnier characters as a Hollywood Now anchor-man who does his over-the-top routine in hyping up the Oscar rumours on his morning show. Jennifer Coolidge (Stifler’s sexy Mom in the American Pie trilogy) is another Guest stalwart, here playing Whitney Taylor Brown, Purim’s scatter-brained producer. Ricky Gervais appears as Martin Gibb, President of Sunfish Classics, the film company financing Home for Purim, although here he plays it very dead-pan.
There’s no denying that the caricatural characters are all funny creations, but the somewhat under-developed script tries too hard to amuse - satirical humour needs to be a bit more subtle than it is here. And of course the base concept is just ludicrous – Orthodox Jews in the Deep South?, speaking Yiddish in drawling Southern accents? – I don’t think so!! Had the film within the film been a little more believable, FYC might have had greater bite. People with no knowledge of things Jewish may miss some of the less obvious jokes – names like Rachel and Schmuel Pischer, the many Yiddishisms, the scene around the Purim table with the special song and so on.
It’s obvious Guest is having a lot of fun mocking Hollywood and even more so, morning television. No-one gets off unscathed, from writers to agents to the media and especially faded stars who make the mistake of having very shoddy (and hilarious!!) facelifts.
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