Penelope Cruz, star of Volver. Jane Lynch and Catherine O'Hara in For Your Consideration.______________
Two eagerly anticipated films by GLBT movie audiences—Pedro Almódovar's Volver and Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration—are opening this week and it's nice to report that the wait has been worth it. Volver is melodramatic while For Your Consideration is a comedy with a razor's edge, but the two are tangentially linked by their use of the film medium as their source of inspiration—the first via homage, the second via sharp satire. Both are also deeply satisfying.
Penelope Cruz, star of Volver, last teamed with Almodóvar (who's billed with just one word now—as in DeMille, Spielberg and Cher) on 1999's All About My Mother. Since leaving his stable of players, she's gone on to several high-profile but spectacularly bad big-budget pictures. These included the dreadful Vanilla Sky, Sahara and the interesting Head in the Clouds with Charlize Theron, with whom she shared an on-screen kiss. But Cruz has never quite lived up to the promise she offered in her thrilling native Spanish-language films.
Finally re-teamed with Almodóvar on Volver, however, Cruz does. As Raimunda, the mother of the sexed-up nymphet daughter, Cruz gives a magnificent and revelatory performance. Raimunda lives in Madrid and is saddled with Paco, a drunken husband and the libidinous inclinations of her Lolita-like daughter, Paula. She works hard for the money, toiling as an illicit hairdresser along with her nervous, whining sister Sole, who keeps complaining that the ghost of their mother (Carmen Maura) is haunting her after a visit to their aunt Irene in La Mancha, the village of their birth. The melodrama builds as Almodóvar, who obviously based his script on Mildred Pierce (as Raimunda temporarily takes over a restaurant) and elements of Psycho, tosses in escalating elements of mystery and suspense.
Eventually, Raimunda sees the ghost of the mother, who has come back to make amends and act as a guardian angel. The two have some very affecting scenes together.
All this is framed in the vivid, candy-bright color palette the gay director is noted for. Cruz is spectacularly dishy, like a sexy Mildred Pierce if essayed by Sophia Loren (and there's more than a nod to Loren's own great mother role in Two Women in Almodóvar's script as well). But this Mildred has good reasons to protect her naughty Veda and, in playing out this scenario, Almodóvar does for his source material what Todd Haynes did for Douglas Sirk when he made Far From Heaven. He reimagines and boils down the overdone melodrama until it's poignant and affecting.
Lately, a crop of young filmmakers has risen to steal some of the master's thunder but Volver, stylish and thrilling, proves that there is only one Almodóvar.
There is also only one Christopher Guest, who made the improvisation film famous when his Waiting For Guffman became a success in 1996. Guest, who had himself co-starred in another comedic improv film, This Is Spinal Tap, played the lead in Guffman as the ultimate show-tune queen, Corky Sinclair. Along with another master of improv, Eugene Levy, Guest created a basic outline for the film, worked out detailed character bios and cast a group of other comic talents to work out his vision. The result, in which the closeted community theatre director Corky leads a group of ragtag thespians in an original musical revue, provided many laughs and tossed nasty darts at the little town mores it parodied.
That movie led to two others created the same way: Best in Show, which was about the world of dog contests and A Mighty Wind, which, improbably, focused on the folk-music scene. Now Guest and company—for that is what they have become—take on perhaps the most obvious of targets, the movie business, in For Your Consideration. Each of the films has featured a crack group of actors with razor-sharp comic timing. Former SCTV vet Levy has been joined in each outing by Catherine O'Hara, Parker Posey and Fred Willard. Several others—Jennifer Coolidge, Ed Begley, Jr., Michael McKean, Michael Hitchcock, Bob Balaban and Harry Shearer—have also been regulars in the Guest films. The group also includes two of my favorites, one-time Annoyance Theatre member Jane Lynch and John Michael Higgins; both played outrageous, hilarious gay characters in Best in Show.
Guest starred in the first film but has taken a back seat in subsequent outings. Though he does that again here (as the director of the film within the film, sporting high-heeled sneakers), the movie still feels like a subtle sequel to Guffman—a sort of Corky Goes to Hollywood—in which we see the players—from the the crew members on up to the studio heads— all caught up in the possibility that actress Marilyn Hack (beautifully played by O'Hara) might get an Oscar nomination for her work in the still-shooting little indie film Home for Purim. The hysteria goes into hyper drive when another actress in the film (Posey) and the movie's leading man (Shearer) begin to get Oscar buzz as well.
Part of the giddy fun of all Guest's pictures is seeing what looks and accents his regulars have come up with for the new outing and what crazy tangents their characters will go off on and that keeps the movie clipping for a good 20 minutes. But then the picture somehow goes a bit off kilter, perhaps because, for the first time, the parody target is overly familiar and well worn. It regains steam in the second half thanks to a screamingly funny sight gag involving O'Hara (and don't let ANYONE spoil it for you), then ends too abuptly. As always, O'Hara, another SCTV veteran, creates fully-realized comic creations. In her SCTV days, O'Hara's celebrity impersonations and homages were visually hilarious, but in the Guest films she's done them without the outsized wigs and make-up. Here, more than in the other films, she combines the pathos underneath the satire and breaks your heart at the same time she's getting laughs. It's a performance that deserves, well, consideration for an Oscar. Wouldn't it be the ultimate irony (though a well-deserved one) if she won?
Check out a preview of upcoming November films and DVDs when Knight at the Movies joins hosts Amy Matheny and Peter Mavrik this week on www.windycityqueercast.com . You can also find past reviews at www.windycitytimes.com or www.knightatthemovies.com . Feedback can be left at the latter Web site.
