20 February,2021 07:27 AM IST | Mumbai | Johnson Thomas
Breaking News in Yuba County. Pic/Youtube
A fairly intriguing story gets the trashy treatment in Tate Taylor's amiably cast darkly satirical look at fame and the tabloid media. Starring accomplished names like Allison Janney, Awkwafina and Mila Kunis the film aims for a side-splitting high but all it achieves instead is a sad downward curl of the lip.
The story of a woman - Sue Buttons( Allison Janney) a middle-aged suburbanite, wearing her cloak of invisibility as she goes about her routine within her home and call centre job, who one fine day finds her husband, banker Karl (Matthew Modine), in bed with his mistress (Bridget Everett). A confrontation follows and Karl's heart gives out⦠and this happens just when Sue was beginning to fuel her self-esteem with affirmations. Sue is no longer ready to just become a wallflower widow. She buries the evidence and craving for kind of focus that a TV personality (Juliette Lewis) is devoting to the case of a missing girl - she makes the startling claim that her husband is missing.
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While Janney works up a froth trying to lend pitch-perfect timing to a transformative lead role, the rest of the cast just hang on for much needed screen time. The film, coming at a time when social media and its influencers are having trending days almost everyday, feels tremendously antiquated given that its primary focus is breaking news and celebrity achieved from being seen on the idiot box. Amanda Idoko's screenplay feels lacklustre and jaded with a 70's mind set and very little give for current times. It's not a straightforward genre film either. The mix of skewed social commentary, supine black comedy and farcical crime caper doesn't quite straighten-up into an enjoyable whole. The comedy of errors schema plays out to ghastly consequences. We get a brief glimpse of the kind of madness this film could have achieved in the postscript exchange between Sue Buttons and talk show host portrayed by Juliette Lewis. The hint of wildness achieved there remains undermined in the narrative that preludes it. Much of the film consists of half-hearted attempts to be preposterous.
