Operation Y and Other Adventures of the Sheriff – Weekend

In the summer Russian box office, where there are almost no big news, there is an old-fashioned, as if from the mid-nineties, crime comedy in which human stupidity, greed and violence are opposed by the local sheriff, played by John Hamm (Don Draper from Mad Men). About a simple, but fascinating film about eternal vices tells Vasily Stepanov.

There is a commotion in Buckland County, New Mexico. A girl in yellow is murdered: Maggie Moore was clearly pursued at first, and then shot dead – an outrageously cruel crime for such a provincial hole. The matter is complicated by the fact that the charred corpse of another Maggie Moore was found in the desert a week earlier, and now the local sheriff Sanders (Jon Hamm) and his deputy (Nick Mohammed from Ted Lasso) will have to sweat to tie the two corpses. The viewer, unlike the servants of the law, knows the details of the criminal conflict with two premeditated murders from the first minutes of the emergence of a criminal plan in all details – the motive, the customers, the performer, and the painful everyday details of the atrocity. Evil, of course, is banal. Behind the planning and execution of the murder of two Maggies are not at all criminal cartels or terrible maniacs, but the most ordinary, for the time being, quite respectable citizens.

Almost everyone in Buckland County has something to surprise the local police. One sells moldy sandwiches in his franchised eatery, another hangs Nazi flags in his basement, and a third collects child porn. What can I say – and the sheriff himself is not without sin: the widower Sanders amuses himself with writing ambitions and diligently, in order to become a real author, attends evening literary courses at a school that he graduated from forty years ago. To a certain extent, this hero can be considered an auto-parody of the director, who switched to directing from the acting workshop a bit late. “Maggie Moore(s)” is his second full-length work.

The crime comedy of John Slattery – that imposing gray-haired gentleman who was drinking whiskey in the morning in the advertising agency of the Mad Men series, along with Jon Hamm as Don Draper – is, frankly, not amazing. In the end, we have already seen all this, re-seen it in the nineties. And then the criminals were funnier and more insidious, and the townsfolk were more stupid. The first half hour of “Maggie Moore(s)” brings to mind “Fargo” by the Coen brothers, where a would-be businessman played by William Macy ordered the kidnapping of his wife, as well as comedic neo-noirs that flooded the screens after the first successes of Tarantino – like “Kill Zoe” (1993) or Things for a Dead Man to Do in Denver (1995). However, even without particularly surprising, Slattery’s picture is still able to captivate the viewer for its hour and a half. On the one hand, it is playfully homespun realism in the description of the American everyday life – after all, it is always fascinating to look into the dirty kitchen of a fast food sandwich and into the soul of a graying village detective. And on the other – the charm of a confident professional handwriting.

The stars work for pleasure. Being primarily an actor himself – he has more than seven dozen works in his filmography – Slattery allows his artists to recklessly enjoy the characters. And Jon Hamm, the impeccably parted actor, so unbending in the endless roles of special agents and police officers, suddenly flourishes in circumstances that would rather suit Mikhail Zharov in the image of policeman Aniskin. The neighbor played by Tina Fey, who is rolling up to the widowed policeman, is also good (their chemistry with Hamm was tested by the Studio 30 series). The main villain is formidable – the brutal red-bearded bumpkin Happy Anderson, who appears in front of the victims with a sign “I’m deaf, I have a gun.” The second plan is not inferior to the first: everyone in this ensemble will have a couple of minutes for an acting portfolio. Such generosity in our functional age is worth a lot.

In the end, lulled by the actor’s farce and Paul Bernbaum’s good dialogues, by the end of the film, the viewer can not only forget that he has long known who is to blame, but also stop worrying about exactly how the perpetrators will be punished. Why be nervous when you can just focus on the unhurried flow of screen life and, together with the sheriff, sum up the results in the format of simple melancholic prose, inspired by reality itself. By the way, the plot of the film is based on events that took place in reality, however, not in New Mexico, but in Texas at the beginning of the 2000s. Well, as everyone living in the world knows, human stupidity and cruelty do not have an exact geographical or temporal residence. These are eternal, enduring values ​​that cinematography routinely feeds on.

In theaters from June 29

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