'Consideration': Is inside joke too much?

The cast got to improvise much of the film.
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
KANSAS CITY STAR
The comedies of Christopher Guest have always had a fondness for their hapless characters.
Sure, "Waiting for Guffman," "Best of Show" and "A Mighty Wind" made fun of small towns, dog lovers and folk singers. But it was an affectionate fun.
"For Your Consideration," on the other hand, feels mean.
It's about journeyman Hollywood actors laboring in obscurity. And instead of oozing sympathy the film is borderline contemptuous, if not of the characters themselves then of the acting profession in general.
Inasmuch as the movie was made by actors, you could think of it as a celebration of self-loathing. It's my least favorite Christopher Guest movie.
The premise finds a group of largely unknown actors working on an obscure movie called "Home for Purim." It's an artless homecoming melodrama set in World War II involving the Pishers, a Jewish family living in the South. It ought to die a quick death on the festival circuit.
The buzz started
But then the Hollywood gossip mill begins buzzing (nobody knows where the rumor began) that "Home for Purim" has Academy Award potential. Suddenly the cast members are cast into the high stakes, big-ego world of Oscar politics.
"For Your Consideration" is populated with many of Guest's usual suspects. Catherine O'Hara offers a standout performance as Marilyn Hack, an over-the-hill thesp playing the clan's dying matriarch. Harry Shearer is Victor, best known for portraying a foot-long weiner in a kosher hot dog commercial; he plays Papa Pisher. Eugene Levy is Victor's inept and incredibly shallow agent.
Playing the family's long-estranged lesbian daughter is Callie (Parker Posey); their sailor son is portrayed by Brian (Christopher Moynahan). Directing it all is the obsessively preoccupied Jay (Guest).
Then there are the hangers on: A studio publicist who hasn't yet learned to use the Internet (John Michael Higgins); the grinning fools who host an "Entertainment Tonight"-type TV show (Fred Willard, Jane Lynch), the screenwriters (Bob Balaban, Michael McKean) who put up only a token fight when a studio head (Ricky Gervais) decides the film is too Jewish and renames it "Home for Thanksgiving."
Lots of improv
"For Your Consideration," like all of Guest's films, was largely improvised by the cast members. But whereas the earlier films were mockumentaries that aped, however unfaithfully, the conventions of real documentaries, "Consideration" plays like a normal narrative film.
There are some wonderful running gags here, especially the film's obsession with hair. Whether it's Guest's explosive Art Garfunkel bush, Shearer's invasive eyebrows or the never ending bad wigs the actors are required to don for the film within the film, the whole movie is gloriously follicle-challenged. Some of the biggest laughs are at the expense of entertainment journalism, right down to a Charlie Rose-ish interviewer who never lets his subjects get a word in edgewise.
There's some very funny stuff here. But it's not enough to take the venomous edge off the film's ruthless dissection of the insecurities and angst that are an actor's lot.
I don't doubt that people who've worked in Hollywood will find plenty to chortle about. For the rest of us, though, "For Your Consideration" is largely insider baseball.