The uninspired comedy Buffaloed takes a handful of gags and uses them over and over again to fill its feature length. The way the locals of Buffalo, NY speak is one of those gags. They way they look is another. And that’s really about it. The classic film Fargo also pokes fun at the way its characters speak. But there’s so much more under the surface of that film. Buffaloed is a one-note comedy that ends up feeling disposable.
Set in Buffalo, NY, the debt-collection capital of the world, Peggy Dahl is determined to be successful and break out of the chain of poverty in which she was raised. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother pays the bills (just barely) by running an unlicensed beauty salon out of her house. (Ten cent wing night at the local bar – this is Buffalo, remember – helped keep Peg and her brother fed on their mother’s tight budget when they were growing up.)
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If you watch a lot of movies, odds are you end up spending time with characters you don’t like very much. Sometimes that can lead to insight into a perspective you’ve never considered, or to experience a character’s growth as they change over the course of the movie. Other times you can perversely enjoy behavior in which you would never engage, but is cathartic to watch from a safe distance - a comfy chair in a dark room, say. Sometimes it just means you have to grind your teeth for 90 minutes as you suffer through a comedy that’s not funny featuring characters that are gratingly annoying. Such was the case for me with Wilson. I don’t always need characters to learn and grow, especially not in broad comedies. I’m as big a fan as anybody of a show like Curb Your Enthusiasm or Seinfeld, which thrived by the ethos “no hugging, no learning.” If that’s the approach, I do need the comedy to be clever, and it would be nice to not want to throttle the “hero” in every scene.
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