There was a time, the post-Beat, pre-protest era, in which American liberal suburbanites dipped their slightly rebellious toes in the waters of American folk music. It was a time before Bob Dylan tossed cards on the ground and told us that the times they were a-changing; before Leonard Cohen told us about Suzanne, and LONG before Joni Mitchell put the romantic angst of an entire generation of teenaged girls on vinyl in the phenomenally self-pitying Blue.

Of course, those of us who are now in our 40's would rather die than admit we actually listened to the records by Burl Ives and Mitch Miller and the Gang and Pete Seeger before he was an activist and the bleatings of Glenn Yarborough. We'll boast proudly about the many hours we spent watching Warner Bros. cartoons, and laugh about the after-school kitchy pleasures of Shindig! and Hullaballoo!, but we'll never admit that we actually watched, let along enjoyed, the New Christy Minstrels and the Brothers Four and Ian and Sylvia on the Ed Sullivan show. Today, we'll rewrite history by invoking Leadbelly and Josh White and boasting that our parents had Miriam Makeba records long before anyone had heard of world music. But we know the truth. We really did sing along to that bouncing ball.

It has become fashionable, and all too easy, to puncture the self-important nostalgia balloons of the baby boom generation, but perhaps no one is better qualified than that member of the House of Lords, Mr. Nigel Tufnel himself, Christopher Guest. Following his spot-on parody of heavy metal hair bands in THIS IS SPINAL TAP, Guest has turned the weapon of his craft into a more gentle skewer, on which he threads the distant dreams of the talentless (Waiting for Guffman), the obsessions of the leisure class (Best in Show), and now, in A MIGHTY WIND, he reunites the Best in Show cast to give his unique treatment to the long-ago glory days of the witlessly optimistic folk singers that populated our childhood.

The occasion is the death of folk impresario Irving Steinbloom, and in his memory, one of his dysfunctional children, the dyspeptic Jonathan (Bob Balaban) has decided to present a reunion show featuring some of the most popular acts represented by his father. Emerging from obscurity are the earnest Folksmen (Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer), who once recorded for the low-cost division of their record label, producing records with names like "Wishin'" and "Hitchin" and "Ramblin'" and the inevitable foray into psychedelia, "Something Important." They're joined by the New Main Street Singers, a "neuftet" of creepily clean-cut young people led by Terry Bohner (John Michael Higgins) and his ex-porn star wife Laurie (Jane Lynch), a couple who worship the "vibratory power of color", and featuring a downright terrifyingly perky Parker Posey. Rounding up the lineup are Mitch (Eugene Levy) and Mickey (Catherine O'Hara), ex-lovers and purveyors of some of the ickiest titles in folk music history.

Toss in sleazy ex-sitcom star and now-agent Mike LaFontaine (Fred Willard, who utterly stole BEST IN SHOW) and publicists Wally Fenton and Amber Cole who "have one brain between them", (Larry Miller and the hilarious Jennifer Coolidge) and you have so dizzying an array of zany characters that in the film's compact 111-minute running time, we barely have time to get to know them all. But if the characterizations are somewhat more spare than we've been led to expect from Guest's mockumentaries, the wit, which is completely improvisational and bears a kind of demented wisdom remains intact. When Harry Shearer, as the upright bass player for the Folksmen, says "To do then now would be retro, to do then then, was very now-tro", it makes perfect sense. When the impossibly white Ed Begley, Jr., as the Swedish head of a public television network, lets loose with a stream of Yiddishisms, it seems perfectly normal. Yet for all the clever lines and the affectionate, elbow-jab tone of the satire, most of the characters are very much superficial.

Yet two performances stand out as exceptional. Eugene Levy has always been the master of broad slapstick comedy, but here, as the emotionally damaged Mitch Cohen, he turns in a piece of astoundingly brilliant work. This character is someone who put out solo albums that make the Blue-era Joni Mitchell sound happy, complete with cover art that makes him look like a depressive Frank Zappa. Levy captures perfectly the held-together-with-duct-tape aura of a survivor of several nervous breakdowns. Relentlessly literal (when asked if he likes [model] trains, he replies, “I took the bus”), fidgety, and obviously still very much attached to his former partner Mickey, he’s eerily reminiscent of Abbie Hoffman in his later years, when paranoia and disappointment had eaten away all the snarky edge. Catherine O’Hara’s Mickey is brittle and nervous in discussing her erstwhile partner from the desperately conventional suburban she shares with her model train enthusiast/catheter salesman husband ( , who deadpans all the dick and fart jokes); she’s an acoustic Grace Slick. These two comedy veterans don’t so much play these characters as inhabit them, almost as if they were playing themselves.

The key to Christopher Guest's mockumentaries is the gentleness of the satire. Obviously show dog owners are far more ripe for lampooning than the benign blandness of early 1960's folksingers, and if the humor in Best in Show elicits more guffaws because of having more cheap sex, gay, and fart jokes, the affectionate chiding that the subjects of A MIGHTY WIND endure is certainly chuckleworthy, as those of us who are baby boomers look back with both affection and embarrassments at the more ludicrous trends of our childhood.

-- Jill Cozzi

Review text copyright © 2003 Jill Cozzi and Mixed Reviews. All rights reserved. Reproduction of text in whole or in part in any form or in any medium without express written permission of Mixed Reviews or the author is prohibited.

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