Mascots

Mascots is a Christopher Guest film, similar to the director's Best in Show, both simulated documentaries about a competition involving a wacky subculture.  Best in Show, as readers will recall, involved competitors in an elite dog show.  Mascots is about a competition staged between mascot-figures associated with team-sports.  In some ways, Mascots reprises Best in Show with startling, and, perhaps, indefensible, exactitude.  Best in Show began with a consultation with a dog therapist involving a psychologically traumatized hound; Mascots begins with an image of an x-rayed knee-joint and a consultation with an orthopedic specialist.  Unfortunately, the close resemblance between the two films does not redound to Mascots' benefit.  Although the comedy is intermittently funny, Best in Show is by far the better film.  There are several reasons for this:  first, dog shows are real and everyone has probably idled away a few hours watching them.  Accordingly, there is a real competition that can be parodied.  So far as I know, there has never been a competition against team-sports mascots and, indeed, the idea doesn't really make much sense.  Here is why:  the dog show exists as an end in itself -- it's the natural culmination of the aspirations of the participants.  But team-sports mascots don't devise their routines for judges or abstract audiences -- rather, their efforts are directed at rousing the crowd at sporting events.  Mascots is shot on a limited budget -- it is apparently a Netflix production -- and so the film doesn't try to stage a series of sporting events to show us the mascots in actual performance.  Rather, we see their performances in competition, stripped from the natural context in which such figures appear.  The routines comprising the climactic competition, accordingly, seem unnatural, out of place, and weirdly inapposite to a team sports setting.  Some of these competitive routines might be effective and, even, very funny if shown as baffling to the fans assembled for a hockey or soccer game.  But, in the context of the abstract and unnatural fictional competition, the routines don't make much sense and come across as contrived and lame.  (The competition scenario allows the director to import some additional and bizarre characters into the film -- the judges, themselves, are supposed to be funny and their quirks are part of the humor.  But, in Mascots, the three-judge panel comes across as mostly grotesque and delusional.)  The fact is that in an actual sporting event, people pay only marginal attention to the mascot figures cavorting on the side-line -- ultimately, the mascots are too slender a reed upon which to base an entire movie. 

The format of Mascots will be familiar to viewers who have seen other Guest films.  The picture begins with interviews of the contestants.  The picture is shot documentary style and all speeches are improvised -- some of this is fairly funny; other scenes are cringe-inducing.  We see the competitors scheming against one another and rehearsing their skits.  Then, Guest stages the competition itself with the judges' commentary.  Finally, there is a short coda ostensibly shot a year later following the fortunes of some of the competitors.  The characters involved in the competition are presented as naïve figures inexplicably obsessed with sports mascots --there is a bickering couple, two southern sisters who perform something like modern dance (they impersonate armadillos), Ed the Plumber and his dancing turd, and an Englishman who is a soccer mascot and the heir to a long, proud, and oppressive family tradition.  Chris O'Dowd is very funny as a Canadian hockey mascot, a huge animated fist that smashes things up, beats up or rapes opposing players, and that ultimately hurls the floppy corpse of a referee onto the judge's table as a kind of human sacrifice.  Parker Posey is incredibly agile and yoga-flexible in her role as the artistic mascot, performing the part of an armadillo as if she were dancing Swan Lake.  It's all mildly amusing but doesn't really add up to much.

Netflix is an important outlet for films by quirky directors like Guest and Werner Herzog that would probably not be commercially viable in movie theaters.  As such the network is a significant resource and worthy of applause for venturing to produce films of this sort.