A violent suburban crime satirical dark comedy from the director of “The Help” isn’t exactly a sentence you’d expect to hear, and yet “Breaking News in Tuba County” is exactly that. Tat Taylor’s (“Get On Up,” “Ma”) dark comedy centered around Sue Buttons, a stressed out and unappreciated housewife who covers up her husband’s heart attack to make it seem like a disappearance so she can claim media attention.
That’s merely one layer of the plot, because it also involves Sue’s brother-in-law, his boss, his mafia contacts, Sue’s sister, Sue’s husband’s mistress, a police chief, and a whole lot more. In a word, think of it like “Fargo” but set in midwestern suburbia instead of Minnesota, eh?
Allison Janney (“I, Tonya,” “American Beauty”) stars as Sue Buttons and she does a fine job with the material she’s given. Janney excels at bringing these kinds of sympathetically conniving characters to life, and Buttons is no different. Its easy to sympathize with her just as much as despise her. She flips the switch between legitimately frustrated and conniving criminal so quickly that the line starts to blur even for her.
However, the rest of the film’s performances don’t come close. This is a truly jam-packed film, with the cast consisting of Mila Kunis (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” “Family Guy”), Regina Hall (“Girls Trip,” “Support the Girls”), Awkwafina (“Crazy Rich Asians,” “The Farewell”), Samira Wiley (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Detroit”), Jimmi Simpson (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” “Westworld (2016)”), Juliette Lewis (“Whip It!,” “August: Osage County”), Wanda Sykes (“black-ish,” “Over the Hedge”), Matthew Modine (“Stranger Things,” “Weeds”), Ellen Barkin (“Switch,” “Animal Kingdom”), and many more. It’s not worth breaking down their individual performances though, because despite them all being across the board fine and serviceable, every single character in the entire film suffers from one extremely solvable problem.
For any star-studded crime comedy like this, it’s important that you care about the characters. It doesn’t require hours of backstory, but it does require some. However, the film’s biggest issue is that, apart from Sue, no one gets any of that backstory. No one gets any character arcs or moments of choice. It leads to a lot of watching famous people put on accents and say jokey lines while things happen around them.
Even despite getting the most character development, Janney never really feels like Sue. She feels like Allison Janney playing another Allison Janney-type character. Its incredibly frustrating that as the film continues and body’s start to pile up, none of it hits with any impact because you simply don’t care about the body’s that are piling up or the people doing thing piling.
Here’s a perfect example: Awkafina plays the daughter of a mob boss. Early in the film, he tells her that she lost his money because people don’t fear her. She then makes it her mission to make people fear her. However, the two scenes we see her in prior to being told people don’t fear her are of two people being very afraid of her. We’re being told one thing and shown another.
More frustrating is that the film is only around 90 minutes. While short movies are fine and length isn’t immediately a point of criticism, the fact that its this short for a mystery film with a clear lack of character development makes this increasingly frustrating. Its easy to see a version of the film that’s around 30 minutes longer with more meat on its bones to make it a better product.
This lack of audience care for the characters therefore makes those perfectly fine performances across the board seem worse. If you don’t care about the people on-screen, then it becomes a lot easier to nitpick bad accents, weird line deliveries, and leaps in logic. Even moments that do manage to be emotionally effective, like a home invasion towards the film’s end, are soured due to a truly bizarre musical score that sets said home invasion against a wacky whistle and banjo track.
“Breaking News” is a film that just seems like it has contempt for its own characters. They move through the plot simply to further the plot. Someone needs ransom money, so let’s rob a jewelry store! Are there other avenues to get the money? Sure, but they’re bad people, so robbing it is! It’s almost as if first time screenwriter Amanda Idoko wanted to write a crime comedy and then halfway through just started hating every character involved.
Its sad because apart from the music and lack of character development, there isn’t much to criticize. The film is shot competently, and the pacing feels right. It doesn’t drag too much, and there’s even something to be said for its large number of female and POC cast members, even letting Wanda Sykes, a lesbian, play a lesbian.
But if your film is centered around characters you’re supposed to care about, it doesn’t matter how average or fine the rest of the film is. If you botch the characters, everything else tumbles down around it. “Breaking News in Yuba County” is a film that will quickly fade from your mind soon after watching it. It wastes a clearly game cast with a poorly written plot concerned more with stacking teetering plot threads than it is with the characters trying to solve them. 1.5/5
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