Have you ever noticed how most of the crime movies of the Coen brothers are either straight-up drama or black comedies? Take Raising Arizona and No Country for Old Men, for example. It’s hard to believe such drastically different works could have been the product of the same minds. But only a fool would try make a film that meshes together those styles.
So, they weren’t the fools who made 2021’s Breaking News in Yuba County, but I suspect those who did were desperately trying to make the kind of film they thought the brothers would done. Unfortunately, we get many characters with interesting things to say, but most of whom will meet a violent death by the end.
One aspect which makes this distinctive from the works it tries to emulate is the characters are all varying degrees of intelligent. I can’t recall a single character who is played as a moron. One thing which consistently chafes me about the Coen brothers and their ilk is the tone of smug superiority implied by how dense they make some of their characters. So, chalk one up for Yuba on that count, at least.
And just get a load of the talent on the screen. Off the top of my head, there’s Allison Janney, Awkwafina, Wanda Sykes, Ellen Barkin, Juliette Lewis, Regina Hall. Matthew Modine is in it for about five minutes before he dies of a heart attack.
That is the event which kicks the plot into gear. He has a heart attack when his wife (Janney) catches him in flagrante delicto with Bridget Everett in a motel room. After scaring off Everett, Janney buries Modine’s body in the sand under the motel’s playground swings, along with a large bag he had brought with him.
She should have looked in the bag, as it contains a great sum of money Modine was supposed to launder through his bank for a local criminal king pin (and bowling alley owner) played by Keong Sim. Sim’s ruthless henchpeople (Awkwafina and Clifton Collins, Jr.) will run roughshod over every other character as they try to retrieve the loot.
Those characters include Modine’s brother, a reformed thief (Jimmi Simpson) who now works at a furniture store owned by Wanda Sykes and her girlfriend (Ellen Barkin). Simpson thinks his brother has been abducted and he is deceived into paying a random to Sim’s thugs. And then there’s….
Hold up. I forgot to say anything about what the picture is ostensibly about and that is Janney exploiting the alleged abduction so as to receive sympathy and media attention. It’s like a bizarre variation on Munchausen’s by proxy.
Her sister is played by Mila Kunis, a reporter at a low-rated station. She sees an opportunity for advancement by getting an exclusive on her sister’s story. Unfortunately for her, Janney instead manipulates the top local reporter (Juliette Lewis) into covering the story. She does this by fabricating a link between his alleged abduction and a popular trending story of a missing girl.
Jesus, I feel like I’m writing about three or four different movies. Let’s just touch on the performances and then put a bow on this.
Everybody does stellar work for what they were given, with the exception of Mila Kunis. I don’t know what it is, but she doesn’t seem to be fully present. Maybe she realized this film wasn’t all that, and decided it wasn’t worth giving her all.
The script gives the actors good lines to say, though everything scans as a hair too clever. Although I love films where people say things that are smarter than what anybody in real-life ever would, the dialog still has to be believable in the world of the movie.
Wanda Sykes is the one actor here who can really sell the lines. I especially liked how much she wants to get involved in a life of crime. As she puts it, “There’s nothing exciting about being a model citizen.” She even has a gun she improbably found in the parking lot of a Whole Foods.
In the third act, the script subjects these characters to so much violence that it almost feels like it is a cruelly whimsical god smiting them for obscure offenses. For what was a fairly gentle black comedy in the first two acts, there’s suddenly an inexplicable number of shootings, as well as a death by bowling ball drill press to the head. One character even takes an axe to the chest, which I think was intended to play for laughs, though I was completely silent.
Breaking News in Yuba County also has a character who gets kneecapped, which is basically what the film does to itself. What could have been either a decent black comedy or crime picture tries to do one and then the other, only to fail at both. Critics gave this picture the beat-down, though they all loved the Coen brothers film this most resembles. That would be Fargo. I hated that film, too.
Dir: Tate Taylor
Starring a great many actors would be better served by a different script
Watched on blu-ray