Cast a major asset in fairly amusing but scattered "Breaking News in Yuba County"

Breaking News in Yuba County (2021)

The wacky small-town characters of “Drowning Mona.” The delusional dreams and oddball crime-gone-wrong farce of “Nurse Betty” and “Burn After Reading.” The fame-seeking-by-any-means satire of “To Die For.” “Breaking News in Yuba County” would be ahead of its time if none of those other films existed, but director Tate Taylor does attract, as he always does, a staggering amount of on-screen talent and, thus, creates a wonky world of eccentric characters with bad hair all around. Dark enough and just amusing enough, “Breaking News in Yuba County” is an ensemble piece that still could have been a more sharply honed dark comedy with a little more focus in Amanda Idoko’s script.

As if director Taylor is apologizing for giving her such a criminally brief role in “Ma,” Allison Janney leads the way here as Sue Buttons, a meek and mild woman who must listen to her daily affirmations in order to feel appreciated, particularly on her birthday. When following banker husband Karl (Matthew Modine), with flowers in tow, to a motel, she is emotionally destroyed when she finds him having an affair with Leah (Bridget Everett). Sue surprising them ends up giving Karl a heart attack, and he falls dead off the bed. What to do, Sue scares off Leah and buries the body. Unbeknownst to her, she has also buried his suitcase full of $20,000 that belongs to a crime boss, represented by wannabe enforcers Mina (Awkwafina) and Ray (Clifton Collins Jr.). When Sue goes to the police to report her husband missing, she gets turned away. As a local missing 13-year-old girl is the breaking news story on every TV network, Sue gets the idea to frame Karl’s death as a competing missing persons case. Sue may start to get the fame and sympathy that she’s been craving, but she can’t keep her story straight, and straight-shooting Detective Cam Harris (Regina Hall) was not born yesterday. 

A story about ordinary people and their decisions snowballing out of control, “Breaking News in Yuba County” is the kind of dark comedy that the Coen brothers or Danny DeVito might have made years ago. Here, director Tate Taylor wants to balance sympathy and spiky laughs, while also earning some later spurts of violence as the bodies pile up. Taylor does strike an irreverent tone almost throughout, but the sight of blown-off kneecaps and drilled craniums can still be jarring. To convolute matters, a mess of misunderstandings causes many others to get involved and crisscross the chaos. There's Karl’s once-deadbeat brother Petey (Jimmi Simpson) and Petey’s levelheaded wife Jonelle (Samira Wiley), who’s pregnant with twins, and Petey’s furniture store boss Rita (Wanda Sykes), who ends up getting a taste for the criminal life. There’s also Sue’s half-sister Nancy (Mila Kunis), a local reporter who’s selfish enough to get the scoop before anyone else, even Yuba County’s biggest daytime talk-show host Gloria Michaels (Juliette Lewis, in a wig that resembles the “Melon Cat” meme). Many of these characters just add up to collateral damage. 

Amidst the outpouring of recognizable faces, Allison Janney remains the film’s biggest asset. As the adorably named Sue Buttons, Janney finds the emotional truth and jitteriness in an attention-starved woman who just wants to be seen and heard; Sue is done wallowing in her pain and self-pity, only to have dug herself into a hole where she has to believe her own lies. Everyone else in the cast, however, is playing in their own different movie, and not all of them are utilized to the best of their scene-stealing abilities. Samira Wiley’s Jonelle, a voice of reason, seems to exist in the same world as Sue, but then we have Wanda Sykes (who’s hilarious in everything she does) as the gun-toting Rita seemingly coming from a much broader movie with the worst wig of all. Mila Kunis is also pretty much squandered as Nancy, disappearing by the end of the film without mention. Though it’s a negligible role for Ellen Barkin playing Rita’s wife Debbie, there is a very brief “Drop Dead Gorgeous” reunion between Barkin and Janney, making you want to rewatch that overlooked 1999 gem.

“Breaking News in Yuba County” does have its twisted pleasures, and the cast can be fun to watch, even if many of them never rise above caricature status. Regina Hall is particularly funny as a straight-faced detective, who gives you “the right to shut the fuck up,” and Awkwafina taps into a more dangerous side with her larger-than-life unpredictability. Nothing—not the jaunty music needlessly punctuating everything or a script scattered with more one-note characters than it knows what to do with—can truly break Allison Janney’s finely tuned turn. It just makes one wish the movie around her were equally as good.

Grade: C +

American International Pictures released “Breaking News in Yuba County” (96 min.) on digital and in select theaters February 12, 2021.