By
Ian Caruth
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Dogs, nerds prove to be comic gold
Animals in film are usually the comedic kiss of death. There is no better sign that a film is underwritten than the inclusion of a dog in a funny sweater or a farting seal - a stroke of casting equally cruel to the audience, the actors and the animals themselves, who would probably prefer that their eyes be used to test hairspray-covered sandpaper.
Christopher Guest, a man with an absolutely wicked grasp of comic subtlety, understands the pitfalls of animal comedy. One-upping Shakespeare's use of a whimsical dog in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," director/screenwriter Guest uses the dogs in his new film "Best of Show" not as comic set-pieces, but as the ultimate straight men - the dogs are not funny at all, but their blankness highlights the depravity of the humans around them.
"Best in Show" centers around the fictional Mayflower Kennel Club dog show and six way-too-driven dog lovers questing alongside their pooches for the titular award. Shot in the same mockumentary style popularized by Guest's masterpiece "This is Spinal Tap," the film gives audiences an inside look at the surprisingly Machiavellian undercurrents of the inbred-showdog world.
Like "Spinal Tap" and Guest's other significant mockumentary "Waiting for Guffman," the film is almost entirely improvised from a skeletal script.
In the hands of amateur actors, improv comedy can be disastrous. Thankfully, the cast is phenomenally gifted, particularly shrill yuppie Parker Posey and comical Canadian Catherine O'Hara as a woman with an endless roster of past lovers. Fred Willard's third-act appearance as a moronic color commentator - "You know, it's so sad to think that in some countries these dogs would be eaten" - elevates the potentially dull dog-show sequence to the film's comic zenith.
Most mockumentaries are admittedly constructed on a pretty thin premise - the humor hinges on the actors never breaking character, never winking at the audience. However, whereas "Spinal Tap" and "Guffman" were seamlessly constructed like real documentaries, "Best in Show" falters a little. Cameras intrude in unlikely places, and scenes occasionally feel overly staged. This compromises the voyeuristic undertones inherent in a documentary, reminding viewers that all the action and emotion is faked.
This leads to another problem. "Spinal Tap" was so wonderful in part because, despite its piercing parody of heavy metal, its creators' love of the music was apparent throughout. Nobody really loves dog shows - or the people who live and die for them - so it is hard to lampoon pet freaks without seeming a little mean-spirited. "Best in Show" lapses into smugness more than once, but never gets as sneering as other mockumentaries, like the black-hearted beauty pageant-themed "Drop Dead Gorgeous."
Ultimately, "Best in Show" is funny enough to pull off its intermittent superiority complex. Every dog owner is given a distinct personality, with Posey's frantic blueblood perhaps the most memorable. Her introduction to the audience takes place in a pet psychologist's office, where she and her husband - who wear matching braces and have the lisping, spitting diction familiar to all middle school orthodontic patients - are seeking counsel for their laconic Weimaraner, which they believe has been scarred by seeing her owners in the throes of passion.
It is this kind of twisted genius that marks Guest's projects as superior to that of others working in a similar genre. While the mockumentary format seems to be wearing thin in the hands of lesser auteurs, Guest proves there is still plenty of humor to be found in the story of a dog and his idiot.
