A Mighty Wind Spellbound
Cooper, Rand Richards
'A Mighty Wind' & 'Spellbound' Rand Richards Cooper AMERICAN VOICES Whristopher Guest has carved a niche for himself as our master of the mockumen-tary, wreaking comic havoc by taking a serious...
...And are you going to get "helioplankton...
...At the other extreme is April, a dour girl from an impoverished town in Pennsylvania, whose father tends bar across from the closed-down asbestos factory...
...Yet satire requires more than a cast of bumblers...
...Yet where Apted arrived at a deterministic view of social destiny, Spellbound reveals a far more open, fluid, American game...
...The cows, they don't speak English...
...Gently the filmmakers elicit the ideology behind this furious will to prevail...
...A pretty broad swath of American culture, in other words...
...Peopled by likable dullards, Guest's own movies end up being a shade or two less smart than they should be...
...A Mighty Wind brims with deadpan absurdity (one character confides that his parents enrolled him in the Jewish Polo League as a boy), and hilarious failed attempts at the mot juste...
...and the National Spelling Bee, where 250 finalists-out of an original 10 million- gather to duke it out against some of the English language's least useful words...
...Still, if this is satire, if s the gentlest kind imaginable...
...That's one guarantee here-if you work hard, you will make it...
...Neil's father drills him on seven thousand words a day, then feeds him analyses of previous bees...
...our deep ambivalence about highfalutin language...
...The characters are almost too likable- like the Folksmen's genial bass player, smearing skin cream on his face before a show, burbling that the cream "helps me look my best, play my best, be my best-and you can't put a price on that...
...Anybody can win...
...It makes you laugh, but in a sixth-grade kind of way...
...But they'll watch her on TV...
...and they are too gentle-and too dull-to foment villainy...
...The documentary has some of the fascination of Michael Apted's celebrated 7-Up series, which followed a group of London schoolchildren down the decades, conducting a living experiment in the workings of class...
...Guest is too fond of his subjects to locate an enemy value among them...
...His daughter's fixation baffles him, the eight hours a day she spends poring through what must be the world's most dogeared dictionary...
...The music is brilliantly bad, including one number, "Barnyard Symphony," that has the audience's aging folkies neighing and oinking in their seats-it's like a sing-along at a retirement home...
...Because I go through different trials and tribulations, and finally I overcome them...
...Another girl hears her word, "Chateaubriand," and her eyes widen in terror...
...It's almost like...
...As for the performers, life post-1965 has not treated them kindly...
...All these verkackte people," the concert's organizer says with a sigh...
...What Guest loves is messing around with the documentary form itself, the comedy of catching his subjects in the perilous throes of figuring themselves out on camera...
...The two train their video camera on Washington D.C...
...How so...
...Anybody can play...
...His terrain lies wherever modest talent meets delusions of grandeur, and cant serves as cover for a wobbly sense of self...
...I'm not a real success story," he says with a rueful smile...
...There's Angela, from Texas, daughter of a Mexican ranch hand who himself speaks no English at all...
...From there he proceeded, as director, to lovingly skewer small-town theater troupers in Waiting for Guffman and dog owners in Best in Show...
...The result is the most quirk-ily optimistic film about American democracy to come along in some time, a film in which a spelling contest illuminates our best impulses: our American tendency "to look beyond differences and find things that are common," as one of the parents puts it...
...Why do I need to...
...By turns touching, scary, and hilarious, Spellbound measures both the correspondences and the discrepancies between American lives and American myth...
...Two of her uncles are incarcerated," her mother tells the filmmakers...
...ercome them...
...There are scenes seemingly designed to make parents moan in agony...
...As the spelling bee pushed into the later, tougher rounds, the audience in the theater began to murmur in mirth...
...and a Sonny and Cher-like duo, Mitch and Mickey, whose beatific smiles at one another cover a deep, boiling magma of wrath...
...Ding...
...My life is like a movie," confides Ashley, the girl from Washington, D.C...
...Not if you spell it that way, which is how you'd guess at it if, like 99.999 percent of America, you'd never heard the word before...
...Tutors are hired- not only in English, but in French, Spanish, and German as well-to break down English words to their root origins and provide Neil an etymological advantage...
...the filmmakers ask...
...When an overweight and hideously made-up Jennifer Coolidge, playing one-half of a publicist couple (along with Larry Miller), is asked to describe their collaboration, she screws her face up in furious concentration...
...Guest began his career as pseudo-documentarian with his screenplay for Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap, a behind-the-scenes look at a hapless rock band on tour...
...Mitch has been in and out of mental institutions, while Mickey has married a manufacturer of bladder-control products...
...Too true...
...Ding...
...and the bass player for the Folks-men discovers he is transgendered, appearing in one gig in a dress and blond wig...
...and, of course, the cult of the precocious child...
...like we share one brain together," she says...
...April," he tells her...
...A Mighty Wind is Guest's takedown of the folk-music scene...
...I already feel like a champion, just getting here"-and even the most obsessed parents take their kids' defeats graciously...
...Instead, the kids turn out to be models of good sportsmanship-"I'm kind of relieved," one says after being eliminated...
...the meaning of competition...
...Lighten up...
...by first-time filmmakers Jeff Blitz and Sean Welch...
...Uninsistently, Spellbound offers the spelling bee as a primer on democracy...
...Then there's Ashley, a dreamy girl from an inner-city neighborhood in Washington...
...Spellbound succeeds by a shrewd insight-namely, that a spelling bee might shed light on deep themes of American identity and American dreaming...
...It requires, if not an enemy, at least an enemy value (as in, for instance, the rapacious developers of John Sayles's Sunshine State...
...And Emily, from Connecticut, whom we see riding a horse and practicing polo, and who brings her German au pair to the contest...
...The spelling bee itself proves a mesmerizing drama, centered on the dread moment, after each contestant spells his or her word, of waiting for the ding of the bell that means they're out...
...One by one, arcane words fell our heroes...
...There's a special giddiness that percolates when adults watch children doing something far better than they themselves can...
...the Main Street Singers practice a Wiccanesque religious ritual replete with candles and pointy hats...
...One kid is so beside himself with nervousness, he starts spelling "mayonnaise"-his very first letter of his very first word-with an "a...
...Spellbound could have presented a pathology of American competitiveness...
...The movie covers a memorial concert for a famed folk impresario and the three has-been acts who reunite for it: the Kingston Tri-oesque Folksmen...
...he asks, his son translating as the two stand out in a field among the herd...
...the New Main Street Singers, who resemble a grown-up Partridge Family...
...Like the India-born parents of Neil, who prepare for the competition as if for global conquest...
...Of course, some parents are intent on making it their anybody...
...not just stupidity, but cupidity...
...Blitz and Welch's elite eight are breathtakingly diverse...
...Critic A. O. Scott has called Guest's movies "trompe I'oeil satire...
...Mostly by implication, the film takes on education and upward mobility...
...We all knew the bell tolled for us...
...A Mighty Wind addresses the capture of our minds by jargon-marketing, self-help psychology, New Age religion...
...Guest's characters are, shall we say, intellectually challenged, and the camera turns them into virtuosos of the inadvertent, the malaprop-ism, the howler...
...Test yourself on "allegar" vs...
...So instead, he opts for puerile humor, steering a dinner conversation onto the subject of spastic colons, or writing lyrics that inadvertently invoke an act of fellatio as the singers sing on in smiling innocence...
...Eeing smarter than anyone should be, on the other hand, is the matter of Spellbound, a documentary (a real one...
...alegar," or "cabotinage" or "cabotenage...
...There is no way you can fail in this country," Neil's father muses while taking us through the family's sumptuous California house...
...If the events of recent months have left you aching for an alternative version of patriotism, well, here it is...
...A Mighty Wind' & 'Spellbound' Rand Richards Cooper AMERICAN VOICES Whristopher Guest has carved a niche for himself as our master of the mockumen-tary, wreaking comic havoc by taking a serious form and filling it up with silliness...
Vol. 130 • May 2003 • No. 10
