The 12 Best Mockumentaries - Page 2 of 2

best-in-show6. “Best In Show” (2000)
Director Christopher Guest‘s output is one of the main reasons we instigated a one-entry-per-director rule on this list: Without it, titles of his would have taken up too much real estate. As it is, though obviously ‘Spinal Tap,’ which he co-wrote, is a spiritual precursor, of all his directorial forays into the subgenre (“A Mighty Wind,” “Waiting For Guffman,” “For Your Consideration” and now “Mascots” being the others), dogumentary “Best in Show” is the absolute funniest. Lampooning the egos, rivalries and dramas backstage at a prestigious dog show, and featuring some of the best-ever performances from his regular troupe of actors (including Guest himself, along with Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Michael McKean, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Lynch, Michael Hitchcock, John Michael Higgins, Fred Willard and Parker Posey), “Best In Show” may not have quite the bite of other films on this list (it’s a fairly soft target, after all), but its bark is loud and, more importantly, hilarious. Whether it’s Willard’s endlessly quotable dimwitted-but-chatty commentator, Harlan (Guest) “naming nuts,” Gerry Fleck (Levy) having “two left feet,” or endearingly trout-pouted trophy wife Sherri Ann (Coolidge) falling for trainer Christy (Lynch), it’s a series of sketches that, for once in this notoriously uneven format, are far more hit than miss.

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5. “Borat” (2006)
Somewhat torpedoed in the collective memory by its off-the-charts quotability and subsequent embrace by the knuckledragging fratboy element, Larry Charles’ “Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan” is still among the funniest comedies of the century. America’s big-screen introduction to Sacha Baron Cohen, who has yet to outdo this high-water mark, its reputation has accrued some tarnish for its portrayal of Kazakhstan in the more culturally sensitive decade since its release. But that overlooks the fact that in “Borat,” everything is fair game, and it just as often punches up at the monolith of American culture as down at the former Soviet Republic. Sure, the anti-Semitic, misogynistic TV star Borat Sagdiyev is hardly the best representative of a foreign culture, but the people he meets on his road trip come off just as hypocritical and bigoted, while the character’s lovability despite it all is also mirrored in those Americans who meet him with decency and good humor. Really, it’s a showcase for Cohen’s quick wit and for Charles’ way with a scathing vignette, and its ultimate joke, lost on many of the film’s loudest advocates and most vociferous detractors, is the exposure of patronizing condescension passing itself off as tolerance.

punishment-park
4. “Punishment Park” (1971)
Often the most successful, and certainly the best-known, examples of the form are comedies that, more or less affectionately, lampoon their subjects. But while it’s harder to sustain the inherent paradoxes of the approach without jokes to keep engagement high, there have been some stellar examples of mockumentaries with more bitingly satirical intent. “Man Bites Dog” is one (it’s on our recent Found Footage feature and so does not appear here), but even further back, we get to this evisceration of the early ’70s climate of fear and repression in the U.S. by British docu-dramatist Peter Watkins. Prefiguring later faux-docs like “Series 7: The Contenders,” the anti-authoritarian film imagines an America in which opponents of the regime — anti-war protestors, feminists, civil-rights activists — are given a choice, before a kangaroo court, between summary incarceration and participation in a bizarre cross-desert game of Capture the Flag. The baking heat kills several, but even more malevolent are the bored, malcontent, trigger-happy law-enforcement officers who patrol the perimeter. And that’s Watkins’ most devastating point: In an unequal system, the only choice the disenfranchised have is to sit, gagged, on the sidelines or to play a lethal game whose rules have been rigged by their all-powerful opponent.

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3. “Bob Roberts” (1992)
It’s been said so frequently recently as to have zoomed past “truism” and straight to “cliche” that we live in post-satire times, but Tim Robbins‘ brilliant 1992 political satire “Bob Roberts” at times uncannily foreshadows the rise of Donald Trump, specifically in the seemingly contradictory image that Roberts self-creates. A paradoxical mixture wherein extreme right-wing demagoguery co-opts the “cool” rhetoric of the anti-establishment left (the politician is also a Dylan-esque folk singer whose “protest” songs are about the lazy poor and family values), Roberts evokes Trump in the way he cynically manages to pivot his immense privilege into a queasily effective man-of-the-people act. With a great supporting cast including Alan Rickman as his Svengali-like campaign chairman, Giancarlo Esposito as the twitchy journo whom no one believes because conspiracies he unearths are just too big, Gore Vidal as Robert’s sex scandal-plagued Democratic incumbent opponent, and James Spader, Susan Sarandon and Fred Ward as local news anchors, the only critique we can really level at “Bob Roberts” now is that it didn’t set its sights higher than a mere senatorial race — though back then, it probably seemed a bridge too far to imagine such a repulsive character could run for higher office.

F for Fake
2. “F For Fake” (1973)
The inventive, mischievous swan song to a career as remarkable for its near-misses and pathological completion anxiety as for its unquestioned masterpieces, Orson Welles‘ last completed feature film “F For Fake” is, as befits its creator, bigger than the mockumentary format, but also entirely of a piece with it. If, for example, one of the form’s attributes is that one should never “corpse,” well, by the end of the film Welles himself tells us just which parts were true and which were not. But since the whole film is a kind of (fake) essay on the nature of fakery and forgery, it’s safest not to assume that any of it is to be taken at face value. It loosely follows the story of actual renowned forger Elmyr de Hory (whose real story is as notable for the holes as for the cheese), often told through the eyes of his actual biographer Clifford Irving. However, Irving himself is also a fabulist, which sets off an indulgently dense, dizzyingly entertaining stream-of-consciousness-style meta-doodle from the great director. You can define Welles at various points in his career by which Shakespeare character he most resembles: Here he may look like a well-groomed Falstaff, but his spirit is all Puck.

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1. “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984)
If you expected to find anything else at number 1 here, you really don’t know us very well: Rob Reiner’s directorial debut (and incidentally the film that launched a near-unparalleled decade-long run of greatness for a mainstream American director) pops up wherever we can cram it in (Biggest Movie IdiotsBest Fictional BandsEssential Reiner, for starters) and is never far from the top of most of our own personal Most Frequently Rewatched Movies lists. The term “mockumentary” existed before the film, but it was really ‘Spinal Tap’ that popularized it and that still defines the comic heights to which the form can aspire: Its tale of the hubris and excesses of the titular cock-rockers is never too busy being affectionate to be hilarious and never too busy being funny to be warm and weirdly touching. And the cast, particularly the leads playing childhood friends David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) and Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), keyboard player Viv Savage (David Kaff) and an ever-rotating series of ill-fated drummers, along with a plethora of memorable supporting roles and cameos, are uniformly excellent, so much so that many of them have found it hard to escape the film’s monumental, Stonehenge-sized shadow. (That’s actual Stonehenge, not the foot-high model Anjelica Huston makes for them). The absorption of about half the script into the pop-cultural argot of our times has not dented the film’s unique energy, and even when your revisiting stats are in the middle double-digit range, there’s still always some new pearl to discover. Insultingly brilliant, endlessly funny and definingly caustic, it’s a one-film argument for the necessity of the mockumentary form, as well as a high-water mark that may very well never be reached again.

A few suggestions for further viewing in addition to those titles mentioned in passing above: Peter Watkins’ excellent “Punishment Park” was preceded by his TV film “The War Game,” which is also great; Daniel Stamm‘s provocative teen-suicide faux doc “A Necessary Death” is a surprisingly successful experiment in hot-button-pushing; “Death Of A President,” “Interview With The Assassin” and “CSA: The Confederate States Of America” are three less successful but still intriguing alternate-history mockumentaries; and there are several shorter-format mockumentaries you might want to check out, from Peter Jackson and Costa Botes‘s 1997 fictional filmmaker biodoc “Forgotten Silver” all the way back to Luis Buñuel‘s landmark 1933 title “Land Without Bread,” which is somewhere between mockumentary and staged documentary, but also parodies and exaggerates documentary tropes for satirical purposes. Any others that are particular favorites of yours? Let us know about them in the comments.