Folk music between the eras marked by the giants Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan mostly sucked. It is among the biggest ironies of music that the most liberal musical artists in America recorded lightweight, unplugged songs that bore little resemblence to the root music they were supposedly paying homage to. This era is the subject of A Mighty Wind, another one of Christopher Guest's mockumentaries, in the vein of This Is Spinal Tap.
Unlike that comic masterpiece, A Mighty Wind doesn't try to deconstruct some of the pretenciousness and disengenious nature of the music that is its subject. Rather, it's goes for broke with a variety of hit-and-miss jokes, many of which have little do with the subject. When it's funny, it's hilarious (a monolouge from Fred Willard literarlly had me on the floor, and I laughed so hard I was afraid I was going to vomit). When it's not, it's just lame, as when it discuss "witches of color".
The main story revolves around a tribute concert given for a famous folk producer. Three main groups are shown in the efforts to prepare for the concert, The New Main Street Singers, possibly based on Mitch Mitchell and His Gang, The Folksmen, obviously based on the Kingston Trio and Mitch and Mickey, who apparently on based on no one. With the Mitch and Mickey angle, Guest gives us a new angle - characters we actully care about. It seems that Mitch (Eugene Levy, who co-wrote the script with Guest)was a genious songwriter who fell in love with autoharpist Mickey (Catherine O'Hara). The two became superstars, but Mitch took it hard when Mickey left him and the act and has been in and out of mental instituions ever since. When the duo performs at the concert, it is very poiniant, and is the most human moment in any Guest's films.
One of the really dissapointing aspects of the movie is the music, which is not much different than the cheese it parodies. With the exception of "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow", which was nominated for a Best Song Oscar (losing to "Into the West" from The Return of the King), all of the tunes are so leightweight they might be cork. I am not sure if it is possible to parody this style of music, anyway. The songs in Spinal Tap were funny because they took an ultra-serious musical genre and played it to its portencious hilt, whereas it's hard to make intentionally forgettable songs funny without having them be more forgettable.
Thinking back on the film, it probably deserves two and half stars, and is the weakest of Guest's trilogy, but I'm in a charitable mood, and am still chuckling at Fred Willard, so it gets three and tacit reccomendation. Maybe Guest's mistake was dealing with a musical subject at all, This Is Spinal Tap just looms so large.
A Mighty Wind (2003)