WAITING FOR GUFFMAN (57)

Directed by: Christopher Guest

Starring: Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy, Parker Posey, Catherine O'Hara

The Pitch: A behind-the-scenes (but fictional) look at the production of a musical pageant celebrating the illustrious history of the little town of Blaine, Missouri.

Theo Sez: Brilliant fragments, which is why it works better on second viewing - basically the two co-writers (Guest and Levy) gave themselves wonderful parts but didn't work so hard on (or communicate their ideas to) the rest of the cast, or the film itself. Levy's dorky, pedantic dentist with delusions of comic grandeur has a classic bit where he explains how he wasn't actually the class clown in school "but I sat next to him" - and just about everything Guest does (as the perkily effeminate Corky St. Clair) is beautifully designed to straddle the line between laughable and poignant ; problem is, what's around them (small-town life, as opposed to the flamboyant idiocies of Spinal Tap) needed a finer kind of satire than the film's rather broad strokes - the whole UFO thing, for example (especially the bit about the townspeople joining the E.T.s aboard the spaceship for a pot-luck dinner!), might've been omitted. As the climax shows, the film couldn't work if it overdid the flakiness - it's about small-timers, not buffoons : it wouldn't make much sense if the final show was a disaster, or the staging incompetent, or the small-town audience less than enraptured. It's an ode to mediocrity, except that it also means to poke fun at the characters' absurd dreams - all without losing their essential humanity. It's a hellishly difficult balancing act ; far more difficult, you suspect, than the film-makers realised.