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 "'Drowning'
Out" by Scott Mantz
"Drowning Mona"
Danny DeVito, Bette Midler, Jamie Lee Curtis
Directed by Nick Gomez
Have you ever
noticed how small towns are a lot like companies? Everybody knows
an awful lot about your personal life, and everybody gets wrapped
up in way too much political B.S. In short, gossip rules. Since
people have a lot more fun getting wrapped up in someone else's
business than minding their own, it's easy to see why this happens.
Any time there's an opportunity for a film to make fun of this environment,
there's certainly a lot to work with, and the results should be
hilarious (the key words being "should be"). Unfortunately, that's
not the case with "Drowning Mona", a poor excuse for a film that
tries unsuccessfully to pass itself off as a black comedy.
In the forgotten
town of Verplanck, New York, Mona Dearly (Bette Midler) is killed
after her Yugo careens off the road and into the Hudson River (everybody
drives a Yugo, but that's another story). At first it seemed like
an accident, but Chief Rash (Danny DeVito) suspects foul play. Finding
the culprit isn't going to be easy, since everyone in town hated
Mona. Who did it? Could it be her husband Phil (William Fichtner),
who had enough of her physical and mental abuse? Could it be her
son Jeff (Marcus Thomas), who's hand she chopped off after he reached
for her beer? Could it be Bobby (Casey Affleck), who was ready to
cut Jeff off from their lawn-mowing business? Could it be Rona (Jamie
Lee Curtis), who was having an affair with both Phil and Jeff? Could
it be--ah, who cares. This town's crazy!
There are many
questions that come to mind while sitting through, or should I say
suffering through, "Drowning Mona", the most obvious being, "Who
the hell green-lit this thing?" It's hard to imagine what the production
meetings must have been like, but I'd pay good money to meet the
person who thought this was a funny script. At no point during the
film was I able to utter a chuckle, let alone a good laugh. The
jokes simply aren't funny, and the characters are just as ridiculously
pathetic as the one who's name bares the title of the film. At a
scant 92 minutes, I still felt like I was in a torture chamber for
more than a week.
Which leads
me to the next question. Chief Rash may be wracking his brain trying
to figure out who the killer is, but who cares? From the outset,
it's obvious that Mona is not a very nice person, and she probably
got what she deserved. That should be the end of it. Case closed,
let's get a beer. As we learn more about the characters during the
interrogation process, we realize that they're all just as screwed
up as Mona. Other than Chief Rash and his prissy daughter Ellen
(Neve Campbell), none of the characters had any redeeming qualities
whatsoever. Here's an idea--instead of calling the film "Drowning
Mona", why not re-work the script and call it "Drowning Everybody"?
Bette Midler
continues the losing streak that culminated with "Isn't She Great"
(obviously, she wasn't). Through a series of flashbacks, we get
to witness first-hand why everybody might want to kill her. Instead
of trying to build some sort of sympathy that would make you really
want to know who dunnit and why, we're glad she's gone and would
rather not waste our hard-earned money trying to figure out the
suspect. Jamie Lee Curtis is underutilized as a chain-smoking punk
rocker-wannabe. She's not given much to work with, and we never
really get to know her, nor would we even want to.
Just when it
couldn't get any worse (yes, it gets worse), the ending has absolutely
no payoff whatsoever. At least by then, the film was so hopeless
that you were just glad that it ended at all. This was one of those
films that, when the lights came up, you looked around in disbelief
at what you just saw and gave other people a look that read "Was
that movie awful, or what?" Getting back to business, it's too bad
studio execs can't drown out crap like this and give us faithful
moviegoers the good stuff that we long to see. Even the popcorn
was stale.
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