Best in Show (2000)

The Mayflower Dog Show arrives in Philadelphia, and with it a cross-section of American aspiration so narrow it could be measured with a ribbon. Christopher Guest's mockumentary assembles five owners, their handlers, and their purebreds, and finds in this milieu a gallery of neuroses that have nothing to do with the social questions of the age. The cast is uniformly white, the setting uniformly affluent or striving toward it, and the film makes no attempt to interrogate either fact. This is not a failing. It is a temperature reading. Some films arrive carrying a thesis. This one arrives carrying a terrier.

The film does register on the instruments in one respect. Its two same-sex couples, Scott and Stefan, a campy pair of Shih Tzu enthusiasts, and Christy and Sherri Ann, whose relationship is conducted under the nose of an oblivious husband, are presented without ceremony or defense. Their affection is a fact of the landscape, not a plea. In the year 2000 this was quietly ahead of schedule, and the film never stops to congratulate itself for it. That restraint is the whole trick. The joke is never that they are gay. The joke is that everyone at this hotel is ridiculous, and they are ridiculous in the same register as the rest.

The remaining ledger is blank. No environmental conscience stirs beneath the poodles. No critique of wealth surfaces, despite a trophy wife and a sugar daddy seated in plain view. Nobody in this film is asked to reckon with their body, their mind, or the sins of their ancestors. The film has no sermon to deliver and no audience to correct. It simply points a camera at people who love their dogs more than they love each other, and lets them talk. We are left with a comedy that trusts its subjects enough to mock them evenly. In an era that has forgotten how to do this, that evenness feels almost archival.