Chili Finger movie review: Judy Greer and Bryan Cranston star in a tabloid-inspired comedy that will tantalize you with mystery

A lot of cinematic weirdness tends to bring out the Lou Grant in me. To jog your memory, when Ed Asner’s character first meets Mary Tyler Moore in the classic sitcom, he says to her, “You know, I’m getting brave.” She cleared her throat and exhaled for a moment before he growled, “I hate guts!”

That’s how I felt watching Ed Benda and Steven Hellstad’s quirky black comedy receive its world premiere at SXSW. You can tell the filmmakers were going for a Coen Brothers vibe with this violent, comedic crime story set in the Midwest (Wisconsin, specifically). With the exception of the central character played by Judy Greer, all of the characters on screen display a kind of eccentricity that is supposed to be amusing or endearing but instead comes off as strange.

Inspired by a real incident that occurred in 2005 in San Jose, Hot pepper finger The film lives up to its title with its story involving Jess (Greer), a small-town divorce attorney who suffers from empty nest syndrome after sending her daughter (Shia Harris) to college. Worse still, she and her grieving husband, Ron (Sean Astin), are so strapped for cash that they can’t even afford to visit her on a parents’ weekend.

So it seems like a divine, if terrible, gift when she discovers, you guessed it, a severed human finger in the bowl of chili served to her at the fast food restaurant the couple frequents. It doesn’t take long for Blake Jr. II (Madeline Wise), the restaurant owner’s daughter, to show up and take charge of the situation. She offers the couple restaurant coupons, which Ron, who lives for their food, is happy to accept. But Jess presses for more, and finally receives an offer of $10,000. And then Ron somehow bluffed his way to getting paid up to $100,000 in exchange for their silence.

This doesn’t sit well with the colorful Blake Jr. (John Goodman, in tough guy mode), who takes pride in the restaurant’s slogan: “It’s not fast food, it’s good food!” He smells a rat and sends his former Marine friend Dave (Bryan Cranston, wearing a handlebar mustache to signify eccentricity) to get to the bottom of things.

The situation becomes more complicated when Dave takes a sniff and eventually discovers that things are not as they initially appeared. Throughout the violent chaos that ensues, Jess, along with an injured factory worker (Paul Stanko) who appears in the proceedings, desperately tries to keep things under control and fails miserably. By the end of the story, the characters have been shot, pierced by arrows, gored by a deer, and nearly burned to death in a barn fire. You start to wonder when someone is going to be thrown into a wood chipper.

Relatively unknown directors – who have previously collaborated on a film, finest, and a documentary film, Children’s table — has somehow attracted a stellar cast for this comedy that strains due to the crassness of its tabloid-inspired title. You can feel the performers going the extra mile to finish the material – especially Goodman and Cranston, who have plenty of experience with this kind of off-kilter black humor but are held back here by the unfunny script. Goodman in particular plays his role so darkly that his scenes have a jarring quality.

Astin immerses himself in his pathetic character with complete commitment, but the running gag about Ron being more upset at the prospect of being banned from a fast food restaurant than anything else is so relentlessly crafted that the character seems mentally challenged.

Only Greer, an unheralded national treasure, manages to rise above the material and deliver a fully dimensional, sympathetic portrait of a woman desperately trying to keep things together but finding herself caught in circumstances beyond her control. Deftly balancing humor and pathos, her performance brings the only real human element to the overly contrived proceedings.