Christopher Guest’s comedies aren’t like anyone else’s; they mix structure and improvisation, documentary affectation and old-school comic storytelling. The folk music spoof A Mighty Wind has these qualities in spades–it also pushes deeper into pathos than anything Guest has done before. The rise of the DVD is catnip to Guest fans who are equally interested in watching tidbits that didn’t make it into a given movie and learning why. Any good movie makes you feel as though there’s more to the story and characters than a film’s running time will allow you to discover, but that feeling is more acute watching Guest’s films, which fans know are developed through extensive research and fanatically detailed improvisation.
Like previous DVD releases of Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman and the Rob Reiner-directed This Is Spinal Tap, the Mighty Wind disc is a smorgasbord of raw material, much of it augmented by commentary from Guest and Levy, who offer insight into their counter-intuitive but very rewarding creative process. Among other things, we learn that the Mighty Wind actors all either knew how to play their instruments or took lessons beforehand; that New Main Street Folksingers leader John Michael Higgins wrote the vocal arrangements for the group’s music; that all the numbers were recorded live during production, and that Guest tried to shoot the movie in roughly chronological order, saving the final concert for the end (which filled the cast with palpably real anxiety).
The disc’s sound is good and the color transfer is solid, if a tad more bleachy than the theatrical version. The disc’s deleted scenes are often more amusing than sidesplitting, with the notable exception of an extended clip of Catherine O’Hara’s Mickey performing "The Catheter Song" at a medical equipment convention (she sounds like Joni Mitchell en route to the gallows). The DVD also includes extended, stand-alone versions of "archival" tv clips created for the movie, which let viewers savor period-accurate design details that were glossed over in the theatrical version. (Look closely at a clip of the Folksmen–Harry Shearer, Michael McKean and Guest–performing on a psychedelic late-60s variety show, and you’ll see that the "bubbles" inside the gigantic lava lamps behind them are helium balloons.) Guest and Levy’s commentary is smart, self-effacing and often poignant. Watching the scene where the huffy Folksmen storm back to their dressing room after the New Main Street Folksingers have stolen their thunder, Levy remarks that seeing Guest, Shearer and McKean wandering the hallways beneath a concert venue does the heart good. Amen to that.
