Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #133 Drowning Mona (2000)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

Alternately, you can follow in the righteous footsteps of a patron who has been paying me to see a broad cross-section of the films of Saint Danny DeVito. I’ve already written up Throw Mama From the Train, Even Money, The Rainmaker, Heist, Ruthless People for this kind, much appreciated soul. Now I am turning my attention to 2000’s Drowning Mona, which is sort of a spiritual successor to Ruthless People in re-teaming Danny DeVito with Bette Midler in the darkly comic story of a crime that nobody seems particularly interested in having solved because it was committed against a miserable misanthrope so unbearable that no amount of karmic punishment seems sufficient, let alone excessive. 

In both movies Bette Midler throws herself into playing someone who single-handedly makes the world a worse, uglier place with lunatic conviction and a heroic absence of vanity. But where Ruthless People afforded her miserable misanthropic a redemptive arc that allowed her to steadily and dramatically improve both morally and physically, Drowning Mona opens with Midler’s Mona plunging to her death in a particularly hideous little yellow Yugo (AKA the cheapest, worst cars of the 1980s, and also possibly ever) before flashbacks reveal her to be arguably the worst person in the world, with the possible exception of her idiot son Jeph (Marcus Thomas). 

Verplanck, New York, where the film takes place, is small and insular enough that the death of its most hated and toxic resident could very well improve property values, as bride-to-be Ellen "Ellie" Rash (Neve Campbell) quips upon learning of Mona’s demise. Mona’s absence will certainly improve everyone’s quality of life. 

Mona isn’t just a singularly unpleasant human being: she is a blight upon the land, a human plague, someone who takes great delight in being the worst they can be. Jeph is every bit as odious. Nobody seems to know exactly how he came to lose one of his hands but everyone seems to agree that it probably has something to do with him being terrible, and an idiot, and surrounded by similarly abysmal human beings. 

William Fichtner is hilariously ineffectual as Phil Dearly, the emotionally castrated man of the house. Fichtner often plays heavies who are sinister, aggressive and calculating but he’s brilliant as a stooge who would probably go the rest of his life without talking if that was an option since clearly nothing good has ever come from him opening his mouth. 

Jamie Lee Curtis costars as Rona Mace, a mullet-sporting waitress who is carrying on simultaneous affairs with Phil and Jeph Dearly less out of any real desire but rather out of boredom and an egregious lack of other options. 

From the perspective of 2020, Drowning Mona is insanely stacked, cast-wise. The great Brian Doyle-Murray has a blink-or-you-miss it bit part, as does a pre-fame Melissa McCarthy, while Will Ferrell sports the world’s worst combover (and there’s no such thing as a good combover) as a low-rent funeral director who doesn’t even bother trying to separate his professional life looking after the town’s dead from his personal life as one of the community’s most dedicated perverts. 

Life in Verplanck, New York is like the Yugo Mona was driving when she drowned: cheap, tacky and barely functional. The thankless task of solving a crime nobody wants solved falls to Chief Wyatt Rash (Danny DeVito).

Midler is typecast to perfection as a hateful harridan who could be the tacky cousin of the loudmouth she played in Ruthless People but DeVito is cast against type as a paragon of decency in a squalid tabloid realm full of schemers and criminals. 

The Chief is into show tunes, an obsession he shares with his adoring daughter Ellie and sees everything through the prism of musicals, like when he tells future son-in-law Bobby Calzone (Casey Affleck) that it’s his job as a father figure to support him, to be Auntie Mame to Bobby’s “Little Patrick.” 

In another context, the lawman’s decidedly unmanly preoccupation with the Great White Way could come off as misanthropic and cheap but DeVito underplays the role in a way that makes it organic and endearing. 

As a dramatic actor, Affleck specializes in conveying almost unimaginable pain. His characters suffer the torments of the damned even in light comedies like this. Affleck is, of course, a horrible human being in real life but an innately compelling performer. 

Affleck plays the role of Bobby, an earnest young man with the terrible misfortune of having to work with Jeph in his landscaping business and consequently someone with even more of a reason to want the Dearlys’ dead than everyone else, dramatically. 

That consequently makes everything funnier because it gives his words a ring of truth, like when Wyatt, being infinitely more gracious than he needs to be, argues that people have more than one side, even a seeming monster like Mona, and Bobby deadpans honestly, “She just showed me the one.” 

Affleck has singled out Drowning Mona as one of the worst films he’s ever made. Critics weren’t much kinder. Drowning Mona has a pathetic Metacritic score of 25 and a 29 percent “Fresh” score on Rotten Tomatoes. 

It’s not hard to see why. Drowning Mona is a light comic mystery with next to no interest in the murders ostensibly at its core. It’s less a Whodunnit than a Whocares? It’s also a very nasty, mean-spirited dark comedy about terrible people. Critics and audiences alike seem to think that enjoying a movie about deplorable characters makes them deplorable, or at the very least mean-spirited. 

DeVito’s character is named Wyatt Rash because those words sound an awful lot like “white trash” when spoken quickly but it’s worth noting that the character does not come off as a white trash caricature at all. 

On the contrary, DeVito lends his Broadway-obsessed lawman an incongruous dignity and humanity. He’s not alone. Drowning Mona has a quietly amazing cast that finds the humanity and the complexity in characters that easily could have come across as one dimensional cartoons in a lesser film.

If I were writing a tacky list of critically reviled movies that are actually funny Drowning Mona would make the cut because it is consistently chuckle-inducing and eminently re-watchable, even if its critical reputation almost could not be worse. 

Black comedy is an inherently tricky genre to pull off because it works against our innate desire to root for and identify with likable characters with redemptive arcs but DeVito is one of its absolute masters, as an actor, a producer and a director. That’s a big part of the reason he proved such a natural fit for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. 

I hate the concept of “underrated” but it sure seems to apply to Drowning Mona, a distinctive, quotable and ultimately very funny sleeper with a knockout cast that deserves at least a modest cult that can appreciate its nasty virtues and malevolent wit in a way audiences and critics at the time of its release did not. 

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