The titular mother in The Mother, the Menacer, and Me is Nancy (The Sopranos’ Lorraine Bracco). The ball-busting, excessively cynical mother-in-law to Eddie (James Austin Kerr) is a more terrifying presence in his life than the schlocky slasher he’s cooked up for his social justice-minded horror pilot “Killing Karens.” Living under her modest roof in Pewaukee, Wisconsin with his son, Billy (Kellen Tetlow) and his very pregnant wife, Anna (Christine Spang), Eddie dreams of winning a development deal to whisk him out of the Cheesehead state, out of Nancy’s insulting purview, and into Hollywood stardom.
Jon Salmon’s light-hearted comedy insists on an old, sunny platitude: that it’s never too late to chase your dreams. Eddie and his life-long best friend Joe (Alfonso Caballero) are elder millennials in the suburb of a suburb, but their shared obsession with horror has kept them perpetually on the path of outsized ambition. To date, the pair have made a handful of short films, but their sights are aimed at something higher: the top prize at the fictional Hollywood Elites Film Festival, where the top prize is a sparkly development deal for a “major streamer.” The thing is, their film idea doesn’t seem all that original, and more often than not, it seems they have no idea what they’re doing.
The Mother, the Menacer and Me Has Too Much Heart To Serve Its Subject Faithfully
Perhaps inadvertently, Chris Carvalho and Chris Plaushin’s co-written script reads like a fictionalized American Movie. Chris Smith’s landmark 1999 documentary followed two cinema-obsessed (if delusional) friends in Menomenee Falls, Wisconsin as they chased their horror dreams to the degree that they were alienating those around them, while falling deeper and deeper into a money pit. Smith followed Mark Borchardt, who became a stand-in for anyone with a hope and a prayer and an idea that just won’t go away. It’s sweet and touching despite the ridiculousness of its subject.
The Mother, the Menacer and Me is not nearly as sad as all that and Eddie is not the hopeless picture of deadbeat romanticism Borchardt is, but that is part of the problem with the film: it’s entirely too earnest. It’d be one thing if the film Eddie and Joe were making seemed to have the actual promise of talent their enthusiasm suggests, but frankly, the “Killing Karens” film, in which the Menacer targets that brand of racist suburban woman, feels pretty stock.
Indeed, much of the comedy here is extremely broad, too. A lot of the humor is mined from Wisconsin in-jokes. People even passingly familiar with the state will hear accents and references to burger chains and local townships and nod with understanding. But the midwestern charm that is so baked into a film like Fargo is sorely missing here. Instead, a lot of the jokes are shoe-horned in with a knowing audience in mind.
Still, it’s a very gentle and watchable film. Nancy is pretty one-note as a character, but leave it to a pro like Lorraine Bracco to imbue it with more feeling and nuance than it probably deserves. Kerr is an amiable enough actor, as is Spang, and you could do worse than follow around these misguided amateurs. Watching Eddie and Joe exhaust every possible option for fundraising — donating blood, donating sperm, taking up a job as a used car sales associate — is fun, and there are a lot of really solid jokes. Though, maybe Nancy isn’t entirely wrong to suggest Eddie is being irresponsible considering he has two children, and that his only consistent source of income is selling historical figurines to old women.
Whatever the case, the film’s ending does boggle what precedes it by seemingly brushing aside its messaging. One gets the impression the film might’ve been better served if it leaned harder into the metastasizing delirium of Eddie’s imagination, whereby the Menacer speaks to him and begins suggesting he kill Nancy, for real. The film that does exist here is so placid that it mostly goes by without much thought, matching its credit card commercial-like televisual style. Perhaps Eddie should’ve considered marketing; at least he knows how to sell a dream.