Drowning Mona
Last weekend I watched "Drowning Mona". It's the kind of movie that is hard to classify precisely -- is it funny? Kind of. Is it weird? Sort of. Imagine a pondering, contemplative DeVito as police chief Wyatt Rash, investigating the death of redneck mother of pure evil Mona Dearly (Better Midler.) Imagine a mulleted Jamie Lee Curtis as chainsmoking waitress Rona Mace, who we soon learn is having an affair with brow-beaten "Wheel of Fortune" fan Phil Dearly (William Fichtner.) Remember, this is 1986. Imagine a tiny, tiny, town in which virtually every car being driven is a Yugo -- including the police cars. There is a message at the beginning of the movie which attributes the ubiquitous presence of the cars to a round of testing which occurred in 1986 by the makers of the car. It seems more likely to me that Director Nick Gomez ("The Sopranos", "Oz") merely realized the undeniable comedy in lots of people getting in and out of diminutive Yugos, especially considering DeVito -- the only person in the movie for whom the Yugo's proportions actually fit.
The movie begins with Mona Dearly frowning, then screaming, as she plunges to her death. We soon learn that she was murdered, and the rest of the movie is devoted to figuring out who did it and what to do with him, with the usual small-town movie subplots interwoven. The murderer turns out to be young Bobby Calzone (Casey Affleck, yes he is indeed the little brother of Ben Affleck), a self-employed landscaper as bland and unassuming as American cheese. Bobby is engaged to sweety-pie Ellen Rash (Neve Cambell), daughter of Chief Wyatt Rash. This is one of the subplots I mentioned before. Will Farell is funny and vaguely unsettling as mortician/pornographer Cubby. Tracey Walter is as disheivelled and scrubby as ever as Clarence, basically reprising his role as Miller from "Repo Man", trading his 50-gallon drum of burning garbage for a fishing pole. Tracey, as well as the rest of the cast, is so perfectly suited to his role that his acting hardly seems like acting at all. This gives the movie a very natural and comfortable quality, but also an air of predictability -- We grasp the style of each character instantly and know what they are going to do almost before they do it. Some people like that in a movie, but it makes me want to sneak into whatever's playing next door. To recap -- Yugos, mullet, murder and a happy ending.