Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL)
March 3, 2000 | Gire, Dann
“Drowning Mona” works like a low-rent John Waters travelogue through an upstate New York hamlet where a woman has been murdered – and everyone in town had reason to do it.
The divine Bette Midler stars as Mona Dearly, an irascible and pushy woman who dies in the first scene when the brakes on her Yugo give out, sending the car rocketing through a fence, into the air, and into the Hudson River.
Police Chief Rash (Danny DeVito, also an executive producer) discovers that the brake lines have been cut and the brake-fluid box punctured. Who could have done this dastardly deed?
As Rash investigates, he realizes he has too many suspects, each one equipped with his or her flashback to illustrate Mona’s nasty, abusive, and terrorizing personality.
Could it be Mona’s now-widowed husband, Phil (William Fichtner), a cowering, quaking mound of human Jell-O frequently squished by Mona’s tirades?
How about Mona’s bullied son, Jeff (Marcus Thomas), a beer-swizzling, pot-bellied dufus with a fleshy stump where his right hand should be?
Or maybe cute Bobby Calzone (Ben’s brother, Casey Affleck), the indecisive blond ditz who works as partners with Jeff in a landscaping company. He has felt the wrath of the mightly Mona for suggesting Jeff is a goldbrick.
Let’s not forget Rona (Jamie Lee Curtis, looking more and more like Carol Burnett), the tough waitress at the local diner and the “other” woman in Phil’s life. Did she want to mold Mona’s gelatin man all by herself?
Then there’s Ellen (Neve Campbell), Chief Rash’s daughter and Bobby’s fiancee. She also hates Mona, which could be a motive.
As Rash conducts his investigation with all the animation of Ted Koppel with a badge, he gets help and support from a cockstrutting cop (Kevin Dobson), a perceptive garage mechanic (Kathleen Wilhoite) and a greasy funeral home director (Will Ferrell).
“Drowning Mona” obviously has been created to duplicate the success of the biting 1986 DeVito/Midler comedy “Ruthless People,” about a desperate couple who kidnaps the wife of a wealthy businessman, not realizing he wants the woman dead anyway.
But “Drowning Mona” lacks the sharp dialogue and shrewd direction of that earlier “Ruthless” comedy. Leisurely paced with an anti-climactic ending, it putters along in low gear when director Nick Gomez should be flooring the gas pedal.
Gomez, once the darling of independent cinema with his breakthrough feature “Laws of Gravity,” takes a sharp break from the more serious projects he has been working on (including the boundary-breaking TV series “Homicide” and cable series “Oz” and “The Sopranos”).
In “Drowning Mona,” Gomez keeps a death grip on the comedy. It feels forced and controlled, although some jokes elicit big laughs, such as how local townspeople tell how bovine Jeff got his hand cut off. (All scenarios invariably involve Jeff trying to grab a beer.)
In the film’s running gag, the local town, Verplanck, N.Y., is where Yugo once test-marketed its infamously cheap automobiles, which, as burglars discovered, could be broken into by merely pulling the car doors off their hinges.
At least something feels unhinged in this movie.