Though it can't fully live up to its premise or cast, Addicted to Fresno still has some charms.
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As much as I don't go for celeb culture, I do always dig it when artists I'm fans of are friends. Like watching Nicholas Hoult crash an interview with Elle Fanning for A Complete Unknown, shower her with praise and leave while they both tell each other they love each other is..nice. Just nice. Which leads me to Aubrey Plaza and Natasha Lyonne who constantly sing each other praises in social media. Which made me to wonder: when on earth did they cross paths? Turns out, it's this movie. A dark indie comedy featuring Judy Greer and Natasha Lyonne as sisters going through an intense situation.
The Setup
The film follows sisters Martha (Lyonne) and Shannon (Greer). Shannon is a recovering sex addict that Martha has taken in after rehab, including getting her a job at a local hotel in Fresno. But when Shannon accidentally kills a guest, the sisters will have to go through the proverbial ringer to get away clean.
Premise-wise, I love this movie. This is a near perfect premise for a dark comedy with an absolutely stacked cast of comedic players including our two leads, and bit parts for folks like Aubrey Plaza as Lyonne's love interest, Ron Livingston as one of Greer's paramours, and even a pet funeral business run by Fred Armisen and Allison Tolman (no that's not a Portlandia sketch). Every little bit part is way funnier that is has any right to be because they got great comedic actors to do them.
Also getting rid of a body that no one's actually going to miss, but is a body is a great riff on The Trouble with Harry or a number of other Hitchcock films. So why can't I give it a full-throated endorsement?
There's too many scenes that are...off.
Like how we ended up with a body in the first place.
We learn early on that Judy Greer's Shannon is a sex addict who behaves recklessly when she's upset or tense. Nothing wrong with that. And it also means Greer gets to fire off a bunch of the funniest crude lines you've ever heard talking about her experiences. So the guy that ends up dead is a guest in the hotel that she more or less seduces. Her sister walks in on it....and Shannon starts yelling their established code for sexual assault. Like "ha ha, she's saying she's being assaulted, when she initiated this."
And that put a sour taste in my mouth that was hard to get rid of. This isn't to say you can't make jokes about that, but the fact that Shannon keeps saying that she was being raped over and over again, when she wasn't, really makes it feel like the writer thought this was really funny.
Which in turn means a lot of the edgelord/dark jokes that are made throughout the movie have the vibe of "I'm making this joke because it's upsetting" not "I'm making this joke because it's poking at a taboo."
That stinks because there's a lot of great sequences and moments peppered within this movie. I like that Shannon is a hot mess because of her addiction, but the way she talks about her addiction and how it present feels realistic and honest. There's also a number of inspired scenes in this movie including Greer walking her manager through an effective blowjob, a Bar-Mitzvah that goes completely off the rails, and Lyonne's journey from lonely person owned by her sister's foibles to a more complete person.
And as I mentioned, the cast is so stacked that scenes that shouldn't work, absolutely do. Like Fred Armisen and Allison Tolman's bit as the pet cemetery owners with Tolman going big and Armisen underplaying is an entire SNL-sketch I want in my life.
The movie isn't terrible, but it is uneven and rough enough in spots to make it hard to recommend.
The Verdict: Flawed, But Plenty of Bright Spots
Though it can't fully live up to its premise or cast, Addicted to Fresno still has some charms. 5/10
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