For Your Consideration vs State And Main

Sometimes you hang out with friends and create memories that will last your lifetimes. And other times, you just hang out and watch TV, and not much happens. But you’re still glad they’re your friends, right? Ever since Waiting for Guffman, I’ve considered the members of the Christopher Guest movies to be my movie friends. Oh, how nice it is to see them every couple years; catch up, have a few laughs, even when we’re just kind of sitting around.

I’ve loved all the Christopher Guest improv mocumentaries, and I loved For Your Consideration too. But I loved it more because it reunited me with friends than because it was great. Not that it’s not great. It is.

Kind of.

Guest and company usually spoof areas of entertainment that we’re maybe a little fuzzy on: community theatre, dog shows, folk music. Maybe we’ve experienced these circumstances, but it’s unlikely that any fresh spin on them would be rejected as, you know, bullshit. I believed in the characters and events of Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind because the situations seemed real. The characters are broad and silly, but man, Red White and Blaine seems so authentic that soon enough the characters become true and even though we’ve been laughing at them for ninety minutes, we’re disappointed for them when things don’t work out.

But I live in a world with Premiere magazine, 24/7 internet, Entourage, aintitcoolnews, celebrity blogs, Entertainment Weekly and American Idol. I’ve used the term “celebreality” in a sentence. So, when For Your Consideration is set in Hollywood, there’s a lot of shorthand that they can use with me. For example, no one has to explain to me what the internet is. For Your Consideration is admirably sweet and naïve, but its setting is far less quaint. I guess I wanted it to toughen up some, and it just kept getting softer. When the characters actually arrive at Oscar season, I was ready for the claws to come out. Instead, the focus got softer on the characters, and we got some sort of friendly, non-druggy Requiem for a Dream, with one buzz being swapped for another.

Catherine O’Hara stars as Marilyn Hack, a talented, underappreciated, little-known actress in Hollywood. She reminds me a bit of, say Celia Weston, who is so talented and rocks every role she gets, but usually plays a neighbor or the friend of the main character’s mom, and as a result doesn’t do a lot of press. In other words, she’s never going to have to worry that Joan Rivers will mess up her name, yet she’ll probably work forever. Marilyn is filming Home for Purim, a Jewish holiday film on a tiny budget. It looks sort of like the “women’s pictures” of the 1940s. It’s not a savvy take on the era like Far From Heaven. It’s more like the filmmakers think some 1940s housewives might come out and see their picture. Marilyn is a disciplined actor, friendly with her costars, and generally lovely to be around.

And then the Oscar buzz starts. Someone blogs that Marilyn is in contention for Best Actress, and she becomes somewhat obsessed with the notion of winning. I say “somewhat” because she doesn’t actually seem all that obsessed with it. She doesn’t really even know what the internet is, or how to use it (For Your Consideration is set in the present), and she only tells her costars and what I think is a sister. Catherine O’Hara isn’t spoofing anyone in this part, as far as I can tell. She’s playing Marilyn with grace and subtly. It’s a great performance (the female members of Guest’s ensemble steal the show this time), on par with anything done by the actual “serious” actresses who received nominations last year.

Soon, the rumors start to spread about Marilyn’s costars, specifically Victor Alan Miller (Harry Shearer) and Callie Webb (Parker Posey), and the cast is put through the Hollywood buzz machine. It’s in these moments that For Your Consideration is truly inspired. The characters are profiled and interviewed on note-perfect spoofs of Ebert and Roper; TRL; Charlie Rose; Late Show With David Letterman; and brilliantly, Access Hollywood.

Fred Willard and Jane Lynch play the co-hosts of Hollywood Now. Fred Williard, in a blonde fauxhawk, does a spin on his dog show judge in Best in Show, making inappropriate and uneducated adlibs while interviewing the actors. But Jane Lynch has done her homework. Did you know there’s a stance for the opening of shows like this? It’s hard to picture, but when you see Lynch at the opening of Hollywood Now, you’ll instantly recall seeing Mary Hart, Nancy O’Dell and the lot standing just like that. She’s fantastic, alongside O’Hara and Posey (who is alone in her generation at portraying stridency and vulnerability simultaneously. Her Callie doesn’t care one bit about getting an Oscar nomination, but just look how passionately she doesn’t care.) It’s probably an in-joke worthy of For Your Consideration itself that these actresses ended up delivering performances for which someone thinks they deserve Oscar nominations. I think they did, and I’m gonna put it out there on the internet for everyone to read.

State and Main tells a story similar to For Your Consideration, in a similar fashion, but justifies its quaintness and naiveté by moving the Hollywood types out of Hollywood and into a quaint New England town. True, it’s likely that small-town types would be just as savvy about Hollywood as anyone in the business, but it’s a little easier to swallow in State and Main, because the cast and crew of the film within the film provide contrast by being such shallow, cutthroat Hollywood jerks. The dumb townies wear thin after a while, but I loved the cutthroat Hollywo od jerks.

In State and Main, the crew of The Old Mill (a film like Home For Purim that I’m pretty sure no one would ever want to make or see) descends onto a tiny Ocean Spray cranberry juice-type town. There’s a lecherous actor (Alec Baldwin, at the precise moment he decided to become a kick-ass character actor); a vain, falsely-sincere actress (Sarah Jessica Parker, effortlessly funny, sexy and goofy. Parker has obviously met some actresses like this, or studied their mock-modest appearances on talk shows. Or else this is the real her. Yikes.); a cold, frustrated director (William H. Macy); and our hero, the put-upon screenwriter (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). If that cast, which also includes Patti Lupone and Charles Durning, seems a little stagey to you, it’s no coincidence. State and Main was written and directed by David Mamet, and it probably takes stage actors to wrap their brains correctly around his dialogue.

State and Main is smart in its satire of Hollywood, but leaves the action isolated to the tiny bed and breakfast where the crew is staying. There aren’t any Hollywood backlot scenes with Roman guards and Martians in the background. Instead, we get tiny moments like Parker and Macy negotiating over her nude scene, or a late-night scramble to come up with an alibi for Baldwin’s car wreck with a minor riding shotgun. It’s better this way, since these characters all think they’re the center of the universe anyway.

Above all, State and Main exists as a story whether you consider yourself a minor Hollywood insider or not. It’s got a quaint, small-town romance for those Marilyn Hacks among you; and for cynics like me, it’s got dot-com product placements in a movie set before the invention of electricity. It’d be interesting to see a whole series of movies with this ensemble, written and directed by David Mamet. I’m sure they’d never become my secret friends, like the Christopher Guest company, but they’re also a little less likely to go soft on me at the last minute.

For Your Consideration: B-
State and Main: A-