For Your Consideration
The combined talents of mockumentary makers Eugene Levy, Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest are like their very own Robert Altman — they never really do anything different from their signature product, but it’s always welcome.
Like all mockumentaries the success of For Your Consideration lies in the subtlety. Writers Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy’s working method is to line up an institution many of us would consider a curio (in this case, the Hollywood B-list) and skewer it with quiet but savage wit.
Home for Purim is a down-home, southern-style coming home story about a family of orthodox Jews about to lose the family matriarch (O’Hara) and eagerly awaiting the arrival of daughter Rachael (Posey). Mid shoot of a turkey in the making, unconfirmed talk of awards starts to circulate like a flu virus through the production, and the result is take on the old axiom ‘in Hollywood, nobody knows anything’.
The film is too acerbic to be called a love letter, and while the writing and some of the performances are award-worthy, Guest and his posse are more likely to get blacklisted in a McCarthy-like ban by the rest of Hollywood for exposing the whole vacuous system. See For Your Consideration before they do.
The biggest disappointment is the lame extras, a few interview sound bites the extent of it.