Best in Show (2000)

2 years ago

Best in Show (2000)

WE COULD TALK, OR NOT TALK, FOREVER

by Michelle Said

I have always been fascinated by how dogs can resemble their owners, and vice versa. There’s the elderly prissy lady on 5^th Avenue with the toy poodle, the scrappy loveable pug with the scruffy-haired cheerful mail courier, an elegant Afghan running alongside an equally elegant art curator, and so on and so forth. It’s a stereotype to be sure, but look at Paris Hilton and her purebred-to-the-point-of-inbreeding Chihuahua: the formula works. So it would make sense that a filmmaker would solidify his identity making a movie about dogs. And, of course, anybody familiar with the 2000 mockumentary Best In Show would know that it’s not at all a movie about dogs, it’s a movie about people and their inexplicable desire to define and elevate themselves via their pets.

Like in Guest’s prior work, Waiting For Guffman, we are given a cast of characters from all walks of life. There’s the lower-middle class couple with a pair of Norwich terriers (played by Guest perennial favorite couple Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy), the neurotic yuppie lawyer couple with matching braces and a penchant for Starbucks and catalogues with a Weimeraner named Beatrice (Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock); a slow-talking, easy-going Southern good ol’ boy who has a slow-walking, easy-going bloodhound (Guest); a braindead and apathetic trophy wife (Jennifer Coolidge) with a champion standard poodle named Rhapsody who has hired a fiercely competitive and intense dog trainer (Jane Lynch); and finally a gay couple who fell in love over their mutual love of Shih Tzus (Dean Michael Higgins and Michael McKean).

If you can’t keep all of that straight, don’t worry. The entire process of appreciating a Christopher Guest film is seeing the ways the characters unfold and interact with each other. As in any documentary with multiple subjects, it’s part of the joy of discovering the layers these people reveal. But the whole point of a Christopher Guest film is seeing how he puts all of these ingredients into a pot to make them simmer.

Out of all Guest’s films (Waiting For Guffman, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration), I consider Best In Show to be his best work. So many of the players (and really, I consider any of the standard participants in Guest’s films to be so theatrical and masterful of improvisation that they deserve that title – but that could just be bias dragged over from Waiting For Guffman) are at the top of their form here. The script — written by Guest and Levy — allows tremendous room for the actors to demonstrate their formidable talents. When blonde bimbo Sherri Ann (Coolidge) begins talking about how she and her elderly wisp of a husband have, “an amazing relationship,” extolling its physical nature and their clear chemistry (“We have so much in common, we both love soup… and snow peas, we love the outdoors… And talking… and not talking. We could talk or not talk forever and still find things… to not talk about”), the line is only half of it. The deadpan delivery makes it entirely.

The movie charms and makes the world of dog shows come alive. I found myself actively wondering which of these characters would walk away with the top prize. Would it be first-timer Harlan (Guest)? Another year for Rhapsody? Could the yuppies walk away with the grand prize? I found the result to be legitimately surprising as it doesn’t fit in with standard Hollywood convention. But in the end, no other ending would make sense.

Before shows like The Office (both American and British) and Reno 911 came into the collective consciousness, there was Guest, who defined and refined the art of the mockumentary. I consider Best In Show to be his best work, where he hit his stride with a subject matter that perfectly defined his really unreal oeuvre.

Michelle Said is a freelance writer who recently moved to New York City after spending a year in Dublin. She tumbls here.