BEST IN SHOW

6/10

US 2000
dir Christopher Guest
scr Guest, Eugene Levy
cin Roberto Schaefer
stars Guest, Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Fred Willard, Parker Posey
90m

Best In Show tries to do for the world of professional dog shows what This Is Spinal Tap did for heavy metal, and, though there's no shortage of laughs, it's neither as funny or as skilfully put together as Rob Reiner's gem. Tap wasn't just a spoof of a type of music - it was at least as much a mickey-take of a type of film-making, and it worked just as well either way.

While Tap was an airtight 'mockumentary', Best In Show is a much looser kind of spoof. We follow five lots of dog-owners - a backwoods fisherman (Guest, looking eerily like dog-lover James Ellroy), an unassuming smalltown couple (Levy, O'Hara), a pretentious pair of yuppies (Posey, Michael Hitchcock), a glamorous gold-digger (Jennifer Coolidge) and a flamboyant gay duo (Michael McKean from Tap and John Michael Higgins - as they make their way to Philadelphia for the grand annual Mayflower Show. Four of the five win their respective classes to vie for the final title of 'Best In Show'.

The one 'disgraced' pooch is Hitchcock and Posey's weimaraner, a fairly docile creature whose fractious owners are convinced is always on the verge of "freaking out" - the movie's comic peak comes when the dog's 'busy bee' toy is mislaid, sparking a frantic search for a replacement. But too many of the other scenes fail to reach anywhere like this pitch, and while Tap barrelled along at a consistently high clip, Best In Show is much more uneven, some of the actors sticking to a script and others clearly improvising, with mixed results. The second half does, however, give plenty of screen time to Willard, who proceeds to steal the movie as a TV announcer quite happy to advertise his lack of dog-show nous, reducing everything to baseball and American football analogies.

Best In Show really should end with the awarding of the main prize, and it does build up to a nice freezeframe of the winning dog and handler - but then it tacks on a ten-minute coda set a few months later that adds very little. This kind of uncertainty betrays the suspicion that this is really a brisk hour's worth of material, padded out to feature length. And, as the names of the real dogs in the end credits hints, a 'straight' documentary on the subject would have been, if anything, much crazier.

by Neil Young

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