Roger Rosenblatt, on last night’s News Hour, used A Mighty Wind to reflect on the need for political optimisim. But rather than prove his larger point (in short, “What’s so funny about peace love and understanding?”), his essay just convinced me that film interpretation must be a rorschach test:
There is some funny stuff in the movie’s epilogue, but for me the movie ends perfectly when it recalls something less funny but more moving. Like the two earlier wonder works by Christopher Guest and his gang of comic artists, “Best in Show” and “Waiting for Guffman,” “A Mighty Wind” is a gentle send-up, this time of the folk singers and their audiences of the 1950s and 1960s.
I can’t believe he saw the same movies I did. Gentle sendup? Trenchant satire seems a more appropriate. After all, I’m not sure that the filmmakers “honor what they mock.” Granted, A Mighty Wind pulls its punches more than the other two films by referring only obliquely to the anti-war politics of folk music. (A number of reviewers have made this point.) But I can’t help but feel that Rosenblatt sees loving satire because he in fact is attached to the naivete (or optimism, depending on how you look at it) of folk music.
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