"A Mighty Wind"

One of the mysterious things about "A Mighty Wind" is that, aside from the exuberant and outlandish musical finale (which features a single line that had me doubled over -- a line I invite you to discover for yourself), I can't remember many specific moments that made me laugh. The jokes in "A Mighty Wind" are largely telepathic -- they seep in gradually. Much of what's funny about the movie comes from the distinctive look of each of its characters: Harry Shearer sports a chrome dome and one of those Amish-looking beards that looks as if it's hooked on behind his ears. Parker Posey, as one of the youngest, perkiest members of the New Main Street Singers, has a brief but fabulous sequence in which she maniacally strums a mandolin in front of a group of incredulous schoolchildren.

Fred Willard has a marvelous turn as the New Main Street Singers' not-all-there manager, who sports a spiky Billy Idol haircut that screams "I'm in with the In Crowd." And Jennifer Coolidge, as dim-bulb sexpot publicist Amber Cole, gets laughs even before she opens her mouth (as well as after -- she speaks in a bizarre pidgin-Latina-Swede accent that makes every line a killer). What is it about Coolidge? Even her cleavage is funny. And she pulls off one of the movie's great non sequiturs. When Mickey's husband, a model-train enthusiast, corners her at a party, she nods and smiles blankly and says, "Tank Gawd for the model trains, yeah. If they don't have them, they wouldn't have got the idea for the big trains."

But the most wondrous performances in "A Mighty Wind" come from Levy and O'Hara as Mitch and Mickey. These two form one of the most inspired pairings in contemporary comedy -- perhaps in all of comedy. Their inner compasses are almost eerily calibrated -- each finds his or her comic north in the other. And they play Mitch and Mickey as people who are both better off and yet somehow lost without each other. When we first meet Mickey, she's perched in her cushiony chintz-appointed living room (the shiny coffee table in front of her is adorned with screamingly tasteful china piggies), reminiscing about the old days. We see an old clip of her and Mitch performing; he comes off as cerebral, wooden and charismatic all at the same time; she strums her autoharp with upright schoolgirl earnestness.

Even as O'Hara explains how everything went haywire with Mitch -- and there's no doubt that her current life is a thousand times easier than the old one -- a note of wistfulness creeps into her voice. Later, when she fumes at Mitch for wandering off just minutes before they're due to hit the stage at Town Hall, you can see how much her sharpness cuts into him -- but you also get a glimpse of how her matter-of-factness must have been the chief thing that held him together.

Because Mitch is nothing short of a mess. Levy plays him as a shuffling, unblinking misfit with perennially untamed hair. When he arrives at Mickey's house -- Mitch seems to have spent most of his life in boardinghouses and rest homes; he and Mickey haven't seen or spoken to each other in years -- Mickey's husband, once again eager to talk about his model railroad, asks Mitch if he likes trains. "I took the bus," Mitch replies with glazed straightforwardness, squeezing the words out with a supreme amount of care and difficulty.

The moment is funny -- and yet it's not. A montage of the tortured solo records that Mitch made after the bitter Mitch-and-Mickey breakup flashes by: They have titles like "If I Had a Gun," "Anyone But You" and "May She Rot in Hell" (shades of Richard and Linda Thompson). They're funny too, but they also suggest Mitch's inability to ever shake anything off; he continues to take the world more seriously than anyone ought to, while Mickey has moved on to a universe of chintz and china pigs -- she may be shallow, but at least she's learned to get by.

But when the older Mitch and Mickey finally do take the stage at Town Hall, their differences, just for those few minutes, melt to nothing. You understand that in the course of preparing for and filming "A Mighty Wind," Levy and O'Hara haven't just lived with those characters; they've lived deep inside them.

Not just a put-on (although of course it's that, too), "A Mighty Wind" is steeped in real emotion. Guest and his actors have perfected the art of making it all look more real than real. It's hard to believe these characters don't actually exist in some alternate universe. But there they are on film, at least, a troupe of comic actors who understand that comedy can be the most serious kind of work an actor can do. Thank God for the model trains: Sometimes they're our best way of connecting with the real thing.

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