The Angst and the Ecstasy of Catherine O’Hara

Life, as we know, is not always fair. Right now, when the world seems to be becoming a more and more daunting place, it doesn’t seem fair that we’ve just lost a lady so funny that she helps us forget our angst. In a way, angst is one of Catherine O’Hara’s personal specialties. She agonizes so hilariously over life’s vicissitudes that—momentarily, at least—we forget our own. It doesn’t seem right, frankly, that we had to lose her this past January, at age 71.

 O’Hara, Canada-born, was among the zanies at SCTV from 1976 to 1984. In Hollywood she played a number of memorable though subordinate film roles. I remember her fondly in After Hours, Beetlejuice, and as Kevin’s thoroughly rattled mother in Home Alone. Her longest lasting project was surely Schitt’s Creek,  an outrageous TV comedy (2015-2020) about an L.A. show-biz family forced to relocate, because of financial reverses, to a  Canadian town full of heart and not much else. O’Hara played opposite her good friend (and series co-creator) Eugene Levy, as Moira Rose, the snooty, multi-wigged mom who was once a soap opera star, and now can’t easily accept her much-diminished smalltown life. She seemed destined for an equally long run on Seth Rogen’s hit show, set behind the scenes in Hollywood, when death overtook her. Rogen's sweet tribute to her at the recent SAG awards ceremony is worth savoring.  

But I mostly think of O’Hara in conjunction with a trio of films directed and co-written by the remarkable Christopher Guest. Guest, an actual member of British nobility, had played rocker Nigel Tufnel in Rob Reiner’s deathless 1984 mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap. The experience led him (along with co-conspirator Eugene Levy and a company of gifted comic actors) to launch three largely improvised indies of his own. The first, Waiting for Guffman (1996) is an affectionate spoof of small-town amateur theatricals. It covers the torturous process of staging a pageant to honor Blaine, Missouri’s 150^th anniversary. (Any connection with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is not accidental.) O’Hara and Guest regular Fred Willard play Sheila and Ron Woodard, a perky pair of travel agents who have dreams of musical-theatre stardom. Sheila is prone to drinking a wee bit too much on occasion, which leads her to put her husband in an embarrassing situation indeed.

 By general consensus, the funniest of Guest’s mockumentaries is 2000’s Best in Show, a spoof of dog shows and of the humans who dote on their pedigreed fur babies. O’Hara and Levy are featured as Cookie and Gerry Fleck, a Florida couple who idolize their Norwich terrier and enjoy recording novelty songs in Winky’s honor. Gerry is faced with the challenge of having two left feet (literally), and Cookie—who seems to have enjoyed an exuberant sex life before her marriage—keeps running into former beaus eager to resume the relationship.

 Less well known is A Mighty Wind (2003), which mocks the era when folk music ruled the airwaves. Various Guest regulars (including Parker Posey, Michael McKean, Jane Lynch, and a host of other wacky singing actors) play musicians who amusingly resemble once-legendary groups likes The New Christy Minstrels and The Kingston Trio. The premise is that these groups reunite, decades after their celebrity has faded, for a reunion concert. The stand-outs (as always) are Levy and O’Hara. They play former sweethearts Mitch and Mickey, he now something of a nut case and she a sweet soul with an autoharp and a memory of the kiss at the end of the rainbow. Hilarity of course ensues. 

                    

“Jury Duty”: A TV Star is Born

The prank show is as old as television. How well I remember Candid Camera, various versions of which were around from 1948 to 2014. This hidden-camera reality show delighted in putting the unsuspecting in awkward situations (like encountering a mailbox from which a human hand reaches out to take your mail). There was lots of innocent merriment to be had in seeing others fooled by wacky oddities.

 Then there’s the so-called mockumentary. It’s realistically filmed, as though a camera crew just happens to be looking in on some everyday but slightly eccentric folk. Among movies, I’d cite 1984’s This is Spinal Tap, in which actor Rob Reiner—making his directorial debut—appears on-screen as Martin Di Bergi, earnestly interviewing four members of what is called “one of England’s loudest bands.” Among the droll rockers in Spinal Tap is one played by Christopher Guest, who went on to produce and direct his own series of mockumentaries. These have included my favorite, Waiting for Guffman, as well as the deathless Best in Show, an hilarious send-up of the snooty kennel-club world. The mockumentary format has been used on TV on such sitcoms as The Office, the U.S. version of which pretends to be filming a workplace documentary about the employees punching their time-cards at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company.

 All of this, I suppose, paves the way for an 8-part TV series produced by Amazon Studios and now nominated for three Emmy awards, including Outstanding Comedy Series. It too is a mockumentary, with jurors and other courtroom personnel being interviewed by off-camera journalist-types, supposedly for a film about what it’s like to serve on an American jury. Here’s the key difference from most mockumentaries: though the judge, the bailiff, and eleven jurors are all actors playing roles, the jury foreman has no idea that he’s at the center of an elaborate prank. Ronald Gladden, of San Diego, is a good-natured young man excited about serving on a jury for the very first time.  

 What he experiences is a trial that at first seems straight-forward: the well-heeled owner of a T-shirt manufacturing business is suing a derelict employee who—drunk and disorderly—befouled a huge stack of her product. But nothing goes as planned. The plaintiff is obnoxious; the defendant’s attorney is hopelessly inept; one juror suffers a near-fatal fall; a second is having a major romantic crisis; a third keeps falling asleep in the courtroom; a fourth is a total space-cadet who enters the jury room wearing his own bizarre invention--“chair-pants.” To add to the chaos, the jury’s alternate member is a semi-well-known actor, James Marsden, who can’t help reminding everyone of his celebrity at every turn. (“James Marsden” is played by James Marsden, best known for films like X-Men and Hairspray. His obnoxious but somehow endearing lampoon of his own public image earned him an Emmy nomination.)  Because of Marsden’s outrageous shenanigans to get out of serving, the jury ends up sequestered in a local motel, where many adventures await them, involving both sex and plumbing.

 None of this would work if it were not for Ronald Gladden. As the one person who’s not in on the joke, he’s trying hard to be both a good juror and a friend to all. Yes, he deals with some pretty unspeakable things, but it’s made clear at the end that everyone on the cast and crew loves him. By the end of Episode 8, you will too. I suspect this will not be his last time on the tube. And I know law students will be in stitches over this very funny show.  

 

All in the Family: The Levys of Schitt’s Creek

 As I watch the final season of Canadian sitcom Schitt’s Creek (the best antidote I know for 10 months in quarantine), I continue to marvel at the show’s cozy sense of family solidarity. True, this is hardly Father Knows Best. The four Roses, who were forced to move from SoCal to a tiny Canadian hamlet because of disastrous financial reverses—are about as eccentric as you can imagine. Mom Moira Rose, a former soap opera queen, is an outrageous diva given to wearing fur and feathers on all occasions. Son David has sexually questionable tastes, as well as a wardrobe to die for. Daughter Alexis seems to have been horizontal with every hunk in Hollywood. Dad Johnny, a one-time video-store magnate, keeps desperately trying to hold the family together, with mixed results. Still, they love each other—and their eccentricities are rivaled by those of the local citizenry, who have perfected the Canadian art of tolerance as they take the Roses to their hearts.

 If the Roses are convincing as a family, it’s partly because they partly are. Star and series co-creator Eugene Levy plays the dad, and son David is portrayed by his actual son, Dan, the co-creator who also recently won Emmys for writing and directing episodes of the series. Daughter Alexis is played by the deliciously vacuous Annie Murphy, who in real life is not actually part of the Levy bloodline. But the proprietor of the local eatery is Sarah Levy, who as Twyla is charged with whirring up fruit smoothies for her dad and brother. And the role of the family mom (who often seems more juvenile than her offspring) is filled by the unforgettable Catherine O’Hara. She and Eugene Levy are NOT actually married, but the sense they convey of the push-and-pull of married life may come from the fact that they’ve often played spouses, notably in Christopher Guest’s doggone outrageous satire, Best in Show (2000), in which she is the wife who’s been around the block a time or three and he is the husband with (literally) two left feet. They also make a big impression in Guest’s 2003 follow-up, A Mighty Wind. In this spoof of the Sixties folk music scene, set at a years-later reunion of some of the era’s biggest acts, they score as Mitch and Mickey. Formerly, according to the film, they were musical sweethearts, known for their tender “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow” (he on guitar, she strumming an autoharp while gazing into his eyes). Now, though, he’s a spaced-out former hippie for whom she’s still quietly pining.

 The comfort shown by Levy and O’Hara in playing these wacky roles goes back at least to their earliest Christopher Guest project, 1996’s Waiting for Guffman. Guest, who as an actor was part of This is Spinal Tap, tried his own hand at creating a mockumentary in Guffman, while also starring as a flighty (to put it kindly) theatre director determined to wring talent out of a quartet of Missouri locals putting on the sesquicentennial celebration of their town’s founding. He shared scripting duties with Eugene Levy, who also shows up onscreen as the local dentist (and would-be comedian). In this early Guest film, O’Hara is mated to another of Guest’s regulars, the late Fred Willard. They play travel agents who’d rather sing and dance. (Willard is the jolly one with a quip for every occasion, while O’Hara’s character quietly uses alcohol to drown him out.) 

 Eugene Levy helped script all these films, and it’s clear his writing (as well as his acting) talents run in the family.