Starring: Jennifer Coolidge, John Michael Higgins
Director: Christopher Guest
Rated: PG
SATIRICAL and cynical humour is not the mainstay of the American cinema, but it’s growing on them.
American Beauty was the most successful US film in this vein and it had a British director. Christopher Guest’s Best in Show is a fully home-grown product. Guest calls this film a “mockumentary”.
It is about five couples who have entered their pets in the Mayflower Dog Show.
In the course of the film we meet Harlan Pepper, a lonely country boy and his hound Hubert; the dual left-footed Gerry Fleck and his previously promiscuous wife Cookie and their terrier Winkie; Meg and Hamilton Swan whose marriage is on the rocks because of their weinmaraner Beatrice; billionaire Leslie Cabot and his glamour-queen wife Sheri Ann who is in love with Christy, the trainer of their poodle, Rhapsody in White; and a gay couple from New York, Stefan and Scott with their shih tzu, Tyrone.
This carnival of characters already hints at the film’s weakness – it tries too hard to be funny. Satirical humour works best when the heat is turned up on life just a little, not when it is boiling over.
Best in Show is, on the whole, an amusing film with some very enjoyable moments, but it is not the riotous comedy the US critics claim it to be.
