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Remember the painfully mediocre movie treatment of The Avengers a couple summers ago, which skillfully managed to make a couple of the most intriguing personalities around, Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman, look boring? The best sequence in the whole film is a bit where a bunch of bad guys running around in neon-hued teddy-bear suits. It was neatly trippy, playful cinema that was sadly wasted on an otherwise tepid chunk of celluloid. Now, in the goofy new black comedy (maybe not all that black, but when was the last time you heard something described as a gray comedy?) from Danny DeVito's Jersey Films, the filmmakers have come up with a visual that's just as arresting, but gets a good movie to go with it.
Set in Verplanck, New York (even the name is funny -- but then, New York state has a lot of those: East Quogue, Schaghticoke, Nyack, etc.; next time you're feeling blue, try looking through a New England road atlas and be glad you never had to go on national TV and tell Al Roker you're from someplace like Coxsackie; you can practically have coherent conversations using nothing but NY names: "Lackawanna?" "Amagansett."), population 1461, Drowning Mona follows the chain of events surrounding a particularly remorseless murder where, in the late 1980s, Balkan auto manufacturer Zastava tested the U.S. market for it's white-bread Yugo.
Apparently everybody in town is driving what Dan Aykroyd's character in Dragnet referred to as "the cutting edge of Serbo-Croatian technology." Even the cops, who got 4-doors (in case you've never seen one, a 4-door Yugo looks a lot like a tipped-over filing cabinet with wheels). Against this fleet of frumpy, angular little cars painted in every shade of the not-found-in-nature color spectrum (where did the people who made this movie find so many of the them? still running? with personalized license plates?), equally frumpy, angular, off-color people line up as suspects after the town's most despised resident, Mona Dearly (Bette Midler), drives into the river. Verplanck's head cop, Chief Wyatt Rash (DeVito), discovers that the car's brake system had been over-enthusiastically sabotaged, but when he tries to narrow down the field of suspects, he finds more people than not celebrating now that obnoxious, abusive Mona is dead. Among them are her whipped, understandably wandering husband Phil (William Fichnter); her loutish, one-handed, malaprop-spouting son Jeff (newcomer Marcus Thomas), himself the well-deserved butt of much local humor and conjecture; jealous waitress Rona (Jamie Lee Curtis), who along with Phil (and maybe others) fosters a curious sexual obsession for the home version of "Wheel of Fortune"; Jeff's lawncare-business partner Bobby (Casey Affleck, owner of the winningest smile of any American actor), who's losing money and sanity because of his association with the Dearlys; Bobby's fiancé (and the Chief's daughter) Ellen (Neve Campbell, doing a much better murder mystery than the ones she's usually associated with), who shares with her father a tendency to couch everything in terms of Broadway musicals; and Rash's timid, longsuffering deputy Feege (Peter Dobson). That's not even considering the minor characters, who include a fetishist comb-over mortician (Will Ferrell) and an all-seeing layabout (Tracey Walter, probably best-known for uttering the memorable line from Repo Man, "Smart people ride the bus.") .
Fledgling feature director Nick Gomez (episodes of "The Sopranos" and "Homicide") and first-time writer Peter Steinfeld have capitalized on DeVito's ability to get a good cast onboard for a quirky project. It's a little like something the Farrelly brothers would do, but that you could still recommend to your cousin the Sunday school teacher (as long as s/he rated at least Methodist on the theological liberality scale): drier, and with fewer body fluids. B+
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