No funny money

>> Diane Keaton can’t save the
incoherent comedy Mad Money

by MALCOLM FRASER

Comedy is not an easy thing to pull off; when it fails, it’s a truly sorry spectacle, and such is the case with Mad Money. Diane Keaton plays Bridget, a middle-aged bourgeois housewife in Kansas City. Her husband (Ted Danson) gets laid off from his job, landing the couple in serious debt.

In the first of the film’s many wild leaps of credibility, Keaton winds up with a job as a janitor at the Federal Reserve Bank. There she makes the acquaintance of Nina (Queen Latifah), a (wait for it) saintly but no-nonsense single mother, and Jackie (Katie Holmes), a trailer-trash airhead. Keaton devises a plan for the three women to make off with the worn-out cash on its way to the Reserve’s paper shredder. They pull off the heist, but their newfound wealth leads to a host of supposedly hilarious problems.

Keaton’s manic energy and mom-like amiability occasionally lift the film out of the mire, but after this and last year’s god-awful Because I Said So, her quality control is clearly on the fritz. I wish I could say it’s nice to see Holmes back onscreen, or at least doing something other than breeding Tom Cruise’s alien spawn, but she’s out of her league hamming it up alongside Keaton. As for the Queen, she’s reduced to playing both straight man and stereotype-laden token black character.

When a film is an incoherent mess, there are all kinds of ways a director or editor can impose structure. Some films are held together with a voice-over narration. Others use a framing device where characters appear in “interview” segments to patch up holes in the plot. Still others resort to characters talking directly to the camera. Mad Money uses all three devices. Its pacing is brutally awkward, and the editor often randomly uses wacky wipe transitions befitting a cheap infomercial.

Director Callie Khouri previously wrote Thelma and Louise and directed Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, so she can hardly claim inexperience as an excuse for this dog’s breakfast. The reasons for the debacle may ever remain mysterious, but the result could be used in film schools as a stellar example of what not to do.

Mad Money opens this
Friday, Jan. 18

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