A Mighty Wind

Comedy is like music. You have to know the key and you have to find players with good chops. ~Christopher GuestWriter, director, actor, musician and producer Christopher Guest is the master of mockumentaries and A Mighty Wind, his fourth, continued his tradition of sending up subjects with a mixture of affection and cutting, satirical, sly absurdity.

When a folk music impresario dies, his son (Bob Balaban) makes a deal for a public broadcasting TV concert tribute, reuniting folk acts from the ’60s. Quickly gathering these disparate, aging, flawed souls and trying to arrange a program fit to be broadcast is akin to herding cats and Guest uses his usual repertory of multi-talented, improvising actors.

A Mighty Wind, in fact, is bursting with talent. Eugene Levy, hilarious as a Jerry Garcia-looking mental case and Catherine O’Hara play the long-broken act Mitch & Mickey. Jane Lynch, Parker Posey and John Michael Higgins play members of the Up With People-like The New Main Street Singers, reduced to performing to small, indifferent crowds in amusement parks (Lynch’s Laurie Bohner has also founded Witches in Nature’s Colors, WINC, a color-worshiping religion). Lastly, Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest, and Michael McKean play The Folksmen, a trio originally created for Saturday Night Live (they also appeared in The Return of Spinal Tap). Shearer is particularly funny, improvising with a straight face that can’t help but make you laugh regardless of what nonsense he’s spouting. Shearer wears an Amish-like beard while Guest is made up to look uncannily like Art Garfunkel.

There’s more: Fred Willard is The New Main Street Singers’ obnoxious, overbearing manager; Ed Begley, Jr.’s a hoot as public broadcasting director Lars Olfen, and Jennifer Coolidge will make you laugh as a confident but completely clueless talent promoter.

A Mighty Wind is successful not only because it’s subtle, funny and sharp; it’s also authentic. The various forms of folk songs employed all sound, in every aspect, similar to their antecedents, in a genre which had more variety than non-folk music fans may realize. Likewise, the album covers and “historical” film footage shown, as in This Is Spinal Tap (1984), all look real in their design and texture. The songs were remarkably written by Guest and his co-stars, the funniest probably being Catherine O’Hara’s “The Sure-Flo Song”, which her character Mickey performs at a trade show, about a medical device used for bladder control (sadly, no one is listening to her as she performs).

A Mighty Wind is one of the few comedies I know I’ll be sure to watch again. My complaints are few. The film has raunchy humor in places it’s not required, making it more obtrusive than funny. The film should have also been longer. There’s footage in the film’s trailer that isn’t in the film. Fortunately, the Warner Bros. DVD has a wealth of supplementary material, including a half hour of deleted scenes; most of these should have been in the film and a couple were essential to the film. Especially grievously cut was a scene wherein The Folksmen describe their fall from grace after they “went electric” and released the album “Saying Something”. Also fortunately, the DVD features The Folksmen’s faux 1968 electric performance on TV, in all its Byrds-like glory. Guest, Shearer and McKean have gone on to tour as The Folksmen (and make many TV show appearances), including opening (to the befuddlement of unsuspecting heavy metal fans) for Spinal Tap (who is, of course, also Guest, Shearer and McKean) and taking part in a real folk music festival alongside Peter, Paul and Mary.

There’s more! The DVD also includes the full version of “The Sure-Flo Song”, the entire public broadcasting concert (only parts of which were seen in the film), complete faux ’60s TV footage of the acts, biographies of the groups and a feature-length audio commentary by Guest and Eugene Levy — an embarrassment of riches.

—Michael R. Neno, 2016 Jun 21