Review of Drowning Mona (2000) by Edith N — 31 Aug 2011

The Subtle Balance of Dark Comedy.

A dark comedy needs to give you at least one character to hold onto and feel sympathy for. They can all be flawed, but not every character can have flaws which overcome their basic decency. Not everyone gets this, which is why so many dark comedies are so bad. You have to care about the situation the characters find themselves in and whether or not they'll find their way back out again, or else there's no point to watching it. Where this movie fails in its balance is to have one character be put upon to the point of mindlessness and to have another be so poorly drawn as to be a cipher. No one else is sympathetic enough to hold the story, and the two characters who are spend most of the movie in conflict with one another. I found the story interesting enough to make the movie worth watching, but only just, and I can see why a lot of other people don't.

Mona Lightly (Bette Midler) goes out for a drive one day. For some reason, her keys don't seem to work in her car, so she uses them on her son's, where they do. Only her brakes don't work, and she ends up driving off a cliff into a river, where she drowns. Lucinda (Kathleen Wilhoite), the local mechanic, tells Police Chief Wyatt Rash (Danny DeVito) that the car was sabotaged. Mona Lightly was murdered. Was it her husband, Phil (William Fichtner), who was having an affair with local waitress Rona Mace (Jamie Lee Curtis)? Mona had her suspicions, and she and Phil had fought over it. Was it her son, Jeff (Marcus Thomas), whom she constantly abused and belittled? Was it Jeff's partner, Bobby Calzone (Casey Affleck), who was abused by the whole Lightly family and desperately wanted to fire Jeff but was afraid of what Mona would do to him about it? Bobby is also going to marry Ellen Rash (Neve Campbell), the chief's daughter, and he is having financial worries because of it.

There are several places in the movie where I really felt the solution could have been worked out faster. I get that you don't exactly want your son-in-law-to-be to turn out to be a murderer, so there are questions that the chief would not ask. On the other hand, if he had asked the questions, things would have progressed faster. Like for example, "How much do you know about cars?" Or he could have asked Lucinda what the odds were that the same person did all the damage to Jeff's car. Which is a question you'd think he'd be eager to get answered, given that it stood a decent enough chance of proving that his son-in-law-to-be wasn't a murderer after all. There are also some issues to do with motive which are worth noting. And the thing with the keys. Shouldn't Mona herself have been suspicious, meaning that the whole movie never took place? I don't see her as the sort to just quietly try to see if the keys fit another car. I see her as the sort to make a big fuss about how she was stuck at home all day because her keys didn't work.

Yeah, I'm aware that a lot of people will tell me that I'm overthinking the movie. And I probably am. But I challenge you to explain that decision on Mona's part as something she would actually do. Yes, it's established at the beginning that Yugo specifically test-marketed their cars in the town in question, but does that actually mean that everyone in town would actually own one? The Lightly family actually owns three; I'm not sure I've ever known a family where everyone in it had the same car. Unless Yugo was actively giving them away, it doesn't make sense. And it doesn't make sense that Yugo would give away cars to the entire population. The simple fact is, that part of the story doesn't make sense. If Mona had another reason for driving Jeff's car, maybe. It also strikes me that not enough thought it put into that aspect of things; not enough time is spent wondering why Mona was driving Jeff's car. After all, every car in town has personalized plates.

I have been told that it's hard for people to judge the kind of comedy I will and won't like. In fact, it's worth noting that Will Ferrell is in this as the single least necessary character in the movie--Creepy Mortician Cubby. (The billboards say "as seen on TV"; those are commercials I'm glad to give a miss to.) But that's just it; his character exists for the express purpose of being creepy in the theory that this will be funny to us. But just "creepy funeral director" isn't sufficient. If nothing else, I would like him to tie into the plot in some way more detailed than "there's a funeral." Basically what I want from a comedy is evidence that the people who made it put at least some thought into the story, even if they didn't necessarily put as much thought in as I will when I watch it. I don't expect much of anyone to put as much thought into things as I will.