On Sept. 29, 2000, after bowing at the Toronto Film Festival, Warner Bros. brought Christopher Guest’s mockumentary Best in Show to theaters. The ensemble film, led by Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara and Parker Posey, went on to gross $20 million before attaining cult classic status. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review of the movie is below:
Best in Show is a movie about dog shows, but it’s the humans who have the best moments. All are more neurotic than their inbred superpets. In fact, the dogs are reservoirs of coolness amid the frantic heat of human bitchiness — and dare we say it? — cat fights.
Screenwriter-director Christopher Guest and his writing collaborator Eugene Levy have included plenty of comic bite to go with the barks. While the film drifts in and out of the laugh range, it is much more often in than out of that range and is sometimes sidesplittingly funny.
This ensemble mockumentary is not the kind of macho, star-laden vehicle that Warner Bros. marketers are used to. One can only hope they will allow Best to build slowly so critics and word-of-mouth can reach the optimum potential audience members. The film will be a sure-fire hit on cable and video.
One might complain that the nutty dog lovers on display here are hopeless cliches. But Guest and his cohorts seize the dumb blonde jokes and guy-with-two-left-feet gags and make them fresh again.
The film breaks down into five story lines, with all five headed for the Mayflower Dog Show in Philadelphia. Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock are Illinois yuppies with too much nervous energy and a Weimaraner with a shrink and “issues” with his owners.
Levy plays a menswear salesman with a cuddly Norwich terrier and a bubbly wife (Catherine O’Hara) whose colorful sexual history can not be avoided on the road to Philly.
A gay couple professional dog handler John Michael Higgins, whose sense of showman ship is derived from Liberace, and his partner, Michael McKean has its adorable Shih Tzu teased and trained within an inch of its small life.
Voluptuous Jennifer Coolidge, the wife of a rich though ancient husband, and ace handler Jane Lynch prep their two-time champion standard poodle to go for three straight.
Guest plays Harlan Pepper, a good ol’ boy with a faithful blood hound that he believes can telepathically influence the judge.
In Philly, more hilarious bits revolve around a harried hotel manager (Ed Begley Jr.), the Kennel Club president (Bob Balaban) and especially the television broadcast team of a motormouth (Fred Willard) who never met a bad or smutty joke he didn’t love and his English dog expert (Jim Piddock), whom Willard’s character cannot ruffle — but not for lack of trying.
Much of the film acts like a pseudodocumentary in which actors in character address the camera in interviews that sharply define the depths or limits of their wit and wisdom. Guest lets the movie flow back and forth comfortably in search of the looniest gag or most telling though seemingly idle remark.
The actors are all up for the improvisational style, catching every idiosyncratic tic of these twitchy people.
Monique Prudhomme’s costumes add a great deal of comic flair as the wardrobes for these disparate characters tell us a good deal about them.
Production designer Joseph T. Garrity has found wonderfully tacky homes and hotel rooms, while cinematographer Roberto Schaefer and editor Robert Leighton maintain a nice, easy flow. This is not a terribly visual movie, but who cares? It’s funny as hell. — Kirk Honeycutt, originally published on Sept. 11, 2000.
