Breaking News in Yuba County

 2021, d. Tate Taylor  - amazonprime

At once, Yuba County is very watchable and tonally chaotic. It's a modern madcap satire that feels so very 90's, sandwiched somewhere between To Die For and 8 Heads In A Duffle Bag,

The basic plot finds Allison Janney as an ignored but dutiful housewife who thinks her whole world is figured out.  But, on her birthday, as she arranges her own dinner plans and buys her own birthday cake with her name misspelled, she finds her husband at a hotel, mid-coitus.  The shock of her arrival gives him a heart attack and he dies.  She deals with the body and, because it garners her both attention and sympathy -first from her news reporter sister who fails to do any kind of investigating before reporting - fakes his kidnapping.  It's a lie she's not really clever enough to maintain, and it spins out of control.  Her ex-con-gone-straight brother-in-law becomes embroiled with gangsters he thinks are involved with the kidnapping, and Regina Hall (in one of the most atrocious wigs you'll see in film this year) noses around certain that Janney is full of shit, just needing to prove it.

I don't know if I ever got past the fact that Allison Janney and Mila Kunis are supposed to be sisters. When the Amazon trivia popped up with the factoid that Laura Dern was supposed to play the Kunis role, the film seemed to have so much more potential. Kunis is good in the role it, but she just doesn't fit right (even as they explain she's a half-sister).  Their dynamic doesn't really make sense. (Janney tells a story about when they were younger, being resentful of Kunis when walking her to school one day, and the other little kids called her ugly.  Janney was born in 1959, Kunis '83.  Even if we fudge their ages 5 years on either side Janney would have been in her late teens or 20's and feeling the effects of very little kids taunting her?)

Jimmy Simpson, as the brother-in-law, has his own storyline which pairs him with a thrill junky Wanda Sykes (in the second worst wig you'll see in film this year) that runs alongside Janney's story that never feels appropriately integrated into the film, and actually feels like a whole separate movie kind of given the short shrift.  Simpon's wife is pregnant and he's trying to keep out of trouble, staying on the straight and narrow working an honest job at Sykes and Ellen Barkin's furniture store (Barkin for her part is in the third worst wig you'll see this year...there's some baaaad wig work in this film).  He's got some unfinished business with the Chinese mafia (Awkwafina and Clifton Collins Jr. are the heavies shaking him down) and thinks they took his brother. Sykes is eager to break bad and help him out in obtaining the non-existent ransom.

This is a wild, good-on-paper story that really needed the right director (and editor) to bring it to life. It's certainly stacked with a committed cast who get the temperature of the piece, but its a madcap satire that never quite lifts off. Tate Taylor never captures the moments of violence (of which there are many) adeptly. The way they're presented doesn't understand if they're supposed to be shocking or funny or just matter-of-fact. There's no flair to the violence and easily the physical altercations are the clunkiest moments in a film riddled with them.

I like this film, insofar as it features some of my favourite actors turning in some fun performances, but in many ways it feels more like a rehearsal than the final product.