Rating: C-
Director: Bruce Dellis
Star: Amanda Melby, Rene Auberjonois, Cathy Shim, M. Emmet Walsh
Meh. This is the kind of bland, featureless comedy I would not normally give the time of day, except for it being made in Arizona. Not that you would necessarily know, since there’s precious little sense of location here. There are a few references to local places, like Mill Avenue and Prescott. Otherwise, it’s as generic a setting as it is a generic script, all strip malls and condos. The heroine is Ruth Kiesling (Melby), ne’er-do-well who is on probation and working in a donut shop alongside housemate Meg (Shim) Ruth is struggling to cope with a father (Walsh) who has been in hospice for a year, and just won’t die.
The bills are piling up, and to raise funds, Ruth comes up with a hair-brained scheme. The body of former President James Buchanan is temporarily in Phoenix so some DNA testing can be carried out. Ruth has a friend with access to the warehouse. She swipes the keys, and lifts the body, intending to ransom it back to the government for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The problem is… nobody really cares. Buchanan was, we are repeatedly informed, to dead horse levels, the worst President ever. Nobody particularly gives a damn abiut what happens to his 150-year-old corpse, forcing Ruth to lower her demands and find somebody – anybody! – willing to pay up. Matters are made weirder by the presence of Buchanan’s ghost (Auberjonois), who seems pleasant enough, and chats with her about his historical legacy.
It does illustrate the vanilla flavour which permeates this. Even the worst President ever (did I mention that?) turns out to be a nice guy, just someone who rose to a position for which he was monumentally unsuited. The same goes for everyone else. The nearest we get to a villain is a weird ventriloquist guy, Errol (Steve Briscoe, who like most of the supporting cast, is a local actor), for whom Ruth plays cello. He turns out to be a fence for unusual artifacts (what are the odds?), and steals Buchanan out of her garage. He’s distinctly non-threatening – and that’s another word which could apply to this production as a whole.
For despite the potential darkness in the grave-robbing topic, it gets no edgier than confusion between midgets and hobbits. If you compare this to other local comedies like Car Dogs or The Bellmen, those had a better plot and characters respectively, while both had at least something of an Arizonan “flavour” to them. This feels more like it’s trying to be a Coen Brothers film, but would be the “Is Diet Pepsi alright?” of their filmography. Being Coen-esque means more than dumping buckets of “quirkiness” onto every character and into each scene. I can’t fault the technical aspects, which are fine across the board, and even the performances do what they can. Auberjonois, who died a few months after this premiered at the 2019 Phoenix Film Festival, in particular does a fine job of humanizing his character. It’s all just utterly forgettable.