J Paul Johnson
Heartfelt emotion can come from surprising places, not the least of which is Christopher Guest’s 2003 folk-music parody A Mighty Wind. Every one of Guest’s mockumentaries—a term the director rejects but most embrace—earns its share of laughs as his clueless characters bumble their way through competitions and performances. But of all of them, it’s A Mighty Wind that delivers the payoff of heartfelt emotion in the touching interplay between Eugene Levy’s long-addled Mitch and his singing partner Mickey, played by Catherine O’Hara: their live performance of their 1960s hit “Kiss at the End of the Rainbow” makes A Mighty Wind the rare mockumentary film with a genuine emotional payoff.
Fans of Levy and O’Hara from Schitt’s Creek, if they haven’t already, should of course check out every one of Guest’s mockumentaries featuring the longtime friends and collaborators: Best in Show in particular features the two as marrieds plagued by O’Hara’s character’s awkward encounters with former lovers. In A Mighty Wind the duo’s partnership takes center stage. Mitch and Mickey enjoyed popularity with hits like “Kiss,” “When You’re Next to Me, and “The Ballad of Bobby and June” in the 1960s before their partnership devolved into acrimony and dissolution and Mitch into a severe, even potentially suicidal, depression.
An Occasion for Reunion
The occasion for Mitch and Mickey’s reunion is a folk-revival revue dedicated to the memory of agent-producer Irving Steinbloom and featuring his biggest acts. Those are The Folksmen, a trio known best for their novelty hit “Old Joe’s Place” (with its gimmicky chorus deleting consonants from “Eat at Joe’s”) and a series of sober-minded reflections on, among other things, The Spanish Civil War. The New Main Street Singers each have colorful backstories. Laurie Bohner (Jane Lynch) is a former adult film star who earned success by doing “what the other girls wouldn’t”; Sissy Knox (Parker Posey) a former juvenile delinquent with an unsettlingly chipper disposition. Laurie’s husband Terry (John Michael Higgins), the group’s leader, confesses he was a victim of abuse, “most of it musical in nature.”
All three groups, though, have descended into irrelevance long before the reunion show scheduled to be broadcast on Public Broadcasting Network (PBN). And so the narrative takes shape with the recollections of past glories, reunions of performers, rehearsals for their performances—and the televised live broadcast of the revival performance itself, all presented in the straightforward format of participatory documentary. Guest’s mockumentaries, like Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap before them, take on these simple narrative structures—a competition (Best in Show), rehearsal/performance (Waiting for Guffman)—so that the performers can more easily improvise their lines without being constrained by specific plot points.
In fact, nearly all of A Mighty Wind’s dialogue is unscripted and improvised. What IS scripted, of course, is the general outline, the sequence of scenes, and the content of the songs the groups perform. For A Mighty Wind, the songs themselves came first: “Old Joe’s Place” was written by Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer (who play the three Folksmen); “Never Did No Wanderin’” by Guest and Shearer; “A Mighty Wind” by McKean and Levy; and both the New Main Street Singers’ patently absurd “Potato’s in the Paddy Wagon” and Mitch & Mickey’s moving “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow” by McKean with his wife, the actress Annette O’Toole.
That last song provides the film’s emotional gravitas and earned McKean and O’Toole a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. (No, it didn’t win, and yes, it should have.) And it is a simple and lovely paean to romantic love, one that might have seemed a little innocent even for the swingin’ sixties from whence it supposedly came. But the music A Mighty Wind parodies is astonishingly, unremittently square—and as a consequence, generally ripe for parody. Each of the bands is based, loosely on other acts: The Folksmen on the Kingston Trio, Mitch and Mickey on Ian and Sylvia (or maybe, once they degenerate into diss-folk, Richard and Linda Thompson), and The New Main Street Singers on The New Christy Minstrels, all of whom had their followers in the day.
The folk revival of the 1960s promoted a cultural pluralism that aimed to celebrate America’s regional and musical diversity. As young people embraced the idealism of civil rights and Peace Corps politics, the sociopolitical conscience of folksingers like Tom Paxton, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and especially Bob Dylan gave voice to the era’s boom. Other acts, such as Peter, Paul, and Mary and Simon and Garfunkel, were less explicitly ideological but more commercially successful, and in this uneasy intersection between art and commerce A Mighty Wind’s reunion show takes place.
Mockumentary: Design and Improvisation
By the time of A Mighty Wind, Guest’s mockumentary formula was well established. Guest had co-written and co-starred in Rob Reiner’s 1984 This Is Spinal Tap, a film that earned modest acclaim upon its release. Over the decade to follow, though, it grew a cult following. The “band” Spın̈al Tap (with its absurd missing-tittle letter i and illogical umlaut over the consonant n), featuring Guest, Shearer, and McKean would perform and record as an ongoing entity. The film’s gags—from its amplification “to 11” and the unfortunate demise of drummers to its Stonehenge monoliths and cucumber props—skewered the phallocentric subculture of heavy metal with wit and a charm that won over viewers.
The mockumentary style This Is Spinal Tap adopted may have been, reportedly, something of an accident, one borne of a necessity to let its gifted cast improvise, but it worked perfectly as a vehicle for the film’s canny, pseudo-anthropological study. Shooting interviews on location, editing in b-roll of past performances, including the film’s fictional “crew” (Reiner as documentarian Marti Di Bergi) and their interactions onscreen, and concocting an elaborate diegesis through the use of props (record album covers, songs, paraphernalia) and faux-archival footage of past performances and reportage—all of these techniques would prove rich sources of comedy and fertile ground for exploration in each of Guest’s subsequent films.
The form of the musical hagiography was by then more than familiar to moviegoers weaned on Don’t Look Back, The Song Remains the Same, and The Last Waltz. But This Is Spinal Tap was by no means the first mockumentary. The prior decade, Monty Python troupe member Eric Idle and Gary Weis had made their 1978 Rutles film All You Need Is Cash in a similar vein. (Perhaps following Peter Jackson’s Get Back, a rewatch is in order.) So too did Albert Brooks with his 1979 Real Life. The 1980 box-office surprise The Gods Must Be Crazy. Woody Allen’s 1983 Zelig. If the genre was becoming more commonplace, the trope of presenting fiction as fact was long-standing in tradition, going back as far as Luis Bunuel’s Land without Bread/Terra sin pan/Las Hurdes and Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, perhaps even the Lumières’ The Sprinkler Sprinkled.
Of course, few called these mockumentary at the time. The neologism, a portmanteau combining mock with documentary, perfectly captures what so many of these films aim to do: register the fake as real by using the recognizable tropes of documentary form to tell a fictional narrative. Both senses of the term mock apply in that the content is not real but “fake” and that its aim is to satirize. Reiner and his musical director used the term to describe their This Is Spinal Tap, and eventually the term became part of the popular lexicon: though Guest is on record as rejecting the term, mock is exactly what his mockumentary films do.
In fact, part of what makes mockumentary so ripe for humor is the distinction between audience and character knowledge. Often, we viewers are privy to learn something just before the character does—if the character does at all—making the form a rich source of visual irony. In This Is Spinal Tap, audiences are privy to witnessing the miniscule Stonehenge props dropping from the stage rafters before the onstage musicians process what’s happening. Any instance of direct-address interview can be comically (under)cut with faux b-roll footage disproving the character’s perspective. In some ways, it’s an easy gag. But it’s highly effective nonetheless.
The problem with constantly undercutting the characters is that doing so can interfere with any developing empathy for them. Here is where A Mighty Wind offers something most other mockumentaries, humorous as they might be, so often do not. The first half of the film relies on direct-address interviews to chart each group’s backstory and in doing so will employ that technique. But the second half pivots to a more of a Direct-Cinema approach, simply using the camera to observe and record the live television broadcast of the reunion concert, along with all of the potential pitfalls such an endeavor entails.
In the case of Mitch and Mickey in particular, audiences have already seen the love the two shared—and that neither fosters any ill will toward the other. As Mickey, O’Hara is emotional, but grounded and appreciative of the duo’s past success, with no misguided notion of a return to glory. She simply wants Mitch to able to manage. Levy’s Mitch is a bundle of tics but sincere in his practicing for the moment. Like their fellow folkies The Folksmen, they struggle to come to terms with their past glory, and A Mighty Wind provides some genuine acknowledgement of the difficulty of aging gracefully.
A second trope of mockumentary form is one shared by both This Is Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind to great effect: the elaborate construction and production of a variety of props and archival materials that help create a convincing diegesis for the subjects’ backstory. If in mimicking documentary form a mockumentary must approximate a given reality, then a goal of the filmmakers is to establish a verisimilitude for the world they inhabit. Both films work to produce elaborate, motivated histories for their characters by “re-”creating early television appearances, songs, costumes and the like.
Such attention to detail can not only help establish the verisimilitude necessary for the film to approximate documentary truth; it can also serve a purposeful narrative shorthand that makes unwieldy exposition necessary. Mitch and Mickey’s backstory can be read through their album covers, each of them suggesting a moment in their rise from the earnest black-and-white stare-at-the-camera turtlenecked folkies of Meet Mitch and Mickey (in the style of Astrid Kirchherr’s brilliant low-key photography for With the Beatles) to the heart motifs of their later lovebird phase (in Together Forever and When You’re Next to Me) to Mitch’s later descent into depression (Cry for Help) and suicidal despair (Calling It Quits). Though each image may appear onscreen for only scant seconds, their cumulative effect is both humorous and emotional.
A Mighty Wind has a fine time with these and with the faux-archival staging of all three groups’ televised appearances from the 1960s. The Folksmen’s trajectory is shown in the contrast between their 1965 “Old Joe’s Place” on the black-and-white Hoot-Nite and the more psychedelic “Children of the Sun” on the full-color 1968 show In the Groove. Mitch and Mickey’s “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow,” from a 1966 performance on Lee Aikman’s Folk Hour, is constructed with a heavenlike background and simple accompaniment (a cellist and guitarist) as the two perform their signature song. Like the others throughout A Mighty Wind, Levy and O’Hara themselves perform the vocals and instrumentation: O’Hara learned the autoharp for her performance.
A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow—and at the Heart of the Film
But it’s not just the song that Mitch and Mickey perform: it’s that kiss—the one that punctuates the lyrics in the final chorus. “There’s a kiss at the end of the rainbow,” they croon in unison before Mitch pauses, looks at his partner, and the two delicately kiss before the final line “More precious than a pot of gold.” It was a kiss for which they and their song became famous as a crossover act. The sixties may have been a time of strife and riot, but for these two the simplicity of a romantic folk ballad was a measure of pure bliss. Decades later, in the pressure of the live reunion performance, can an addled, aged Mitch perform his magic again?
Here’s what makes A Mighty Wind the most moving of Guest’s films. We’ve seen the genuine affection Mitch and Mickey shared. We understand the impact they had on their fans. We’re privy to Mitch’s later struggles with depression and despair. We’ve seen him practice, awkwardly, the song he is slated to perform. We’ve seen Mickey reflect with empathy and melancholy on the love the two shared. One of the film’s ostensible experts (Paul Benedict as historian Martin Berg) has opined that that kiss was “a superb moment in the history of folk music … and maybe, maybe a great moment in the history of humans.”
Hyperbole notwithstanding, their kiss—symbolic of a human capacity for genuine romantic love otherwise largely absent from Guest’s work and the mockumentary form more generally—comes to represent not just an innocence lost over the decades but for Mitch a moment of triumph over the demons that have haunted him. When Mitch disappears moments before the duo are slated to take the stage, suspense mounts: will the two perform at all? His absence is explained simply: he was looking for a rose for Mickey. Awww.
A third trope of mockumentary filmmaking, one also evolved from documentary style, is the reaction shot. It may be one of the interviewer/filmmaker, it may be of another documentary subject, or it may be of an audience member in response to performance, but close-ups of characters’ reactions to dialogue or events guides our own response as viewers. When Mitch and Mickey are onstage performing “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow,” Guest adroitly cuts away visually from them to the backstage dressing rooms of the Folksmen and the New Main Street Singers hearing the song waft in on their speakers.
“I know this song, it’s the really pretty one. The one with the kiss.”
“I know this song, it’s the really pretty one. The one with the kiss,” recalls McLean’s character: “Turn it up.” Within moments he, his fellow Folksmen, and the entire New Main Street Singers are watching in the wings, the camera panning across their rapt faces as Sissy wipes a tear in anticipation.
Guest’s editing in this key moment works slowly and effectively as the Mitch and Mickey reach the final chorus. When they complete the line “There’s a kiss at the end of the rainbow” they pause, on cue. Mitch, all eyebrows and hair, gazes affectionately at Mickey; Mickey looks up at him longingly. If consent can be nonverbal, surely this interaction suggests so, and Mitch gently caresses her cheek as they kiss. I am rewatching this for the umpteenth time as I write and it’s the only moment in any mockumentary that has made me tear up, just like Parker Posey’s Sissy.
The reaction of the assembled performers, producers, and audience members is euphoric. Had Guest simply filmed the performance—and he had in a blu-ray special feature that replicates the PBN broadcast—the impact would be pleasant, but slight. Yet given the suspense with Mitch’s disappearance, the importance invested in the kiss, and the all-important reaction shots of the witnesses, that kiss is indeed, as the lyrics say, “more precious than a pot of gold.” That kiss as the promise of eternal romantic love Mitch and Mickey sell is of course a fiction—even the lyrics of the song acknowledge such—but it’s one that moves everyone present to tears.
A Mighty Wind’s A-Blowin’
Inspired by that kiss, all three groups perform a rousing encore of “A Mighty Wind,” each of them taking turns with the verses. It too is a crowd-pleaser, with its sing-along chorus and message of diversity and pluralism. Guest and his collaborators absolutely nail the wide-eyed optimism of this nearly-forgotten subgenre of folk music, matching insipid inspirational lyrics with memorably hooky choruses and enthusiastic performance that borders on the cringeworthy. John Michael Higgins deserves a round of applause for his vocal arrangements. The soundtrack itself, rounding out the above songs with a couple of each group’s other songs—and the quirkiest cover of the Stones’ “Start Me Up” you’ll ever hear—is itself a work of comic genius and heartfelt musicianship.
The film’s epilogue hits something of a sour note, though. To no one’s surprise, the modest success of the televised reunion concert does not much change the career arcs of its performers. Mitch and Mickey go their separate ways, him to writing, her to performing trade shows for her husband’s Sure-Flo line of bladder-control supplies. The New Main Streeters are slated for an inane sitcom in which they live together as Supreme Court justices. The Folksmen play casinos, the punchline being that Mark Shubb (Shearer) is now a transgender woman whose deep bass voice is punctuated by a girlish giggle. Her decision seems embraced by McLean’s character, but it’s still a gag that exists only for the shock of the transition.
Christopher Guest may not have invented the mockumentary, but he surely refined and perfected the genre, proving its flexibility and durability. If anything that exists can be documented, than it can be the subject of documentary, or equally of mockumentary. The 2000s would see mockumentary form gain even greater popularity, if less on film than on television with the success of The Office, then Modern Family and Arrested Development, then Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and most recently What We Do in the Shadows (an adaptation of Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s wonderful 2014 film), while Guest would go on to make For Your Consideration and Mascots.
All of those and Guest’s films in particular have made us laugh, again and again, given the ability of mockumentary film to comment on the fallibility of humans at work and play. But of them, A Mighty Wind is a special case. Though it shares its tone, structure, and style with his other films, its characters’ reflections on aging and contemplations of past glory provide a genuine empathy absent from most mockumentaries. And its climax presents a moment of true, unbridled affection shared by its communal audience. A Mighty Wind‘s a blowin’ a heartfelt emotion, indeed.
