Bette Midler plays the title role in Drowning Mona, Nick Gomez's (Illtown) comedy about murder, matrimony and landscaping gone wrong. Mona is a harpy who rubs everyone she meets the wrong way. She threatens police officers, beats up the townspeople and makes her family suffer. When she turns up dead in her submerged Yugo, fingers start pointing but no one seems all that sorry she's gone. Did her cheating husband, Phil (William Fichtner) do the deed? What about the sons that she tortured? How about Bobby (Casey Affleck) who was forced to keep Mona's loser son, Jeff (Marcus Thomas) on his payroll or face her wrath? Maybe police chief Rash (Danny DeVito) did it, or his daughter, Ellen (Neve Campbell)? The white trash lifestyle of Mona Dearly is told in a series of flashbacks to make the whole picture of her malicious life apparent to the audience.
This is a humorous, if mean spirited, comedy. Under the direction of Gomez, Peter Steinfeld's script is given a crisp, punchy style. Flashbacks and visualized ideas come fast and furious to provide a lot of comedic impact. Gomez was an interesting choice to direct Steinfeld's debut feature, given that it’s a comedy about a crime. Most of Gomez's previous directorial work was been in television crime dramas (The Sopranos, Homicide, Oz), where comedy isn’t a strong element. However, he makes the transition smoothly, assisted by a strong cast that works well as an ensemble. Casey Affleck is good as Bobby, a guy who is just barely bright enough to mow lawns and be the intellectual superior of Jeff, the beer swilling dufus who he is stuck with as a partner. Will Farrell plays Cubby, the undertaker who only warms up at the thought of more work.
Bette Midler is over the top in her lead role – a place she’s accustomed to after all these years of overblown performances. In an odd piece of casting, the filmmakers put Jamie Lee Curtis in the role of Rona a 33-year-old waitress. This is just a bit of a stretch, as Curtis is nearly a decade older than the character she plays, and she doesn’t seem 33 here. Danny DeVito makes a departure from his usual roles playing larger than life extroverts, instead playing a calm, deductive centre of the plot, as he tries to unravel the mystery of why Mona's Yugo careened into the river. One quirky note: everyone in town drives Yugos: the police force, the characters – everyone. It seems that they somehow managed to find every working Yugo in existence in order to put them in this movie.
Drowning Mona is not the next A Fish Called Wanda, but if you like your comedy dark, it is enjoyable.
