Tribeca 2019: "Buffaloed"

Reporting from Tribeca once more here is Jason Adams...

I am not from Buffalo. I am from Rochester, which is one hour or so east of Buffalo. But I'm from close enough to Buffalo to know that Buffaloed -- a new comedy starring Zoey Deutch and Judy Greer -- knows Buffalo. So much so I had to spend some time googling the people that made it. Director Tanya Wexlermight be from Chicago (the Buffalo of the mid-west) but, sure enough, writer Brian Sacca is a ranch-soaked Buffalonian good ol' boy. And so Buffaloed knows its Anchor Bar versus Duffs chicken wing rivalries, and it knows "Go Bills" is how one expresses a goodbye. Its arteries are clogged with verifiable Upstate-isms. 

This might all seem trivial at the outset, but Buffaloed gets its sense of place, and what's so funny about its sense of place, so right that it builds its own little magical world out of it...

That's really kind of a must for this kind of over-the-top black-comedy crime-caper. Buffaloed is broad, but affectionately so, and patches over the goofier spots with an air of madcap verite. This really is how it is, just dialed up a few. 

Zoey Deutch, one of our best young comic actors, doesn't hurt either -- her Peg Dahl is a force of nature, as manic and memorable as Dicaprio in Wolf of Wall Street but much easier to love (at least from an audience member's point of view). Peg's got plans to make something of herself and shuffle outta Buffalo, but her own noxious schemes keep landing her in the pokey. Meanwhile her exasperated ma (Judy Greer) is just trying to keep chicken parmie's on the table. 

Ya add in an over-tanned rival schemer played by Jai Courtney and a good-hearted cop played by Jermaine Fowler and a lovable lunk of a brother played by Schitt's Creek's Noah Reid, and then a slew more charmingly big-natured folks with a tendency towards Hard A's and sweatshirts, and you've just got a real charmer here with Buffaloed, ya do. One I can't make it through reviewing without slipping back into my own Upstate rhythms for. Go Bills!

Comments

[Mike in Canada]

Boy, that is Haley Lu Richardson, you can't fool Mike in Canada.