A woman takes advantage of her growing celebrity status when the police and the public think her dead husband is just missing.
What makes this film so interesting is that every single character in this film is desperately crying for help while desperately playing the tough guy who has something to prove. In a muse of pairings, husbands & wives, two sisters, two detectives, two journalists, two criminals, and two lovers show their vulnerability and while all seem at odds with one another, there is something that attracts them to each other that would appear to be a recipe for disaster no matter how you look at it.
Allison Janney stars as Sue Buttons, a seemingly well-put-together wife who is starving for attention from her husband and the world in general. When she finds herself alone on her birthday, she begins to fall apart as she is dismissed by everyone she knows and when she tries to make herself feel better by making excuses for them, she crawls into a deep hole that only she can pull herself out of. To add to her misery, she has a sister, Nancy (Mila Kunis), who is a struggling journalist that hasn’t quite gotten herself together, but in Button’s heart, she still feels inferior to her.
The true drama starts when husband Karl Buttons (Matthew Modine) hasn’t come home from the office and she feels he is caught up with work and decides to meet him at his office just as he comes out with a bouquet of flowers that she thinks is for her birthday. She follows him to a motel and catches him in the bed with an unknown woman and his heart stops beating right in the throes of wild sex. Instead of being upset, she calmly takes control of the situation by suggesting the woman leave the room and go on about her life like nothing ever happened. After she lays in the bed and quietly plans her future, she decides to bury Karl with an unknown duffle bag full of dirty money. Little does she know that a pair of criminals her husband has been working with will do nothing short of killing her if they find out she has the money.
To complicate matters even worse, a young girl has disappeared from the neighborhood and Gloria Michaels (Juliette Lewis), a popular and compassionate journalist has taken the lead in using the press to cover the story from every angle and to make herself look good in the process. Sue’s sister tries to use Sue’s story to compete for press exposure and the three get entangled in various traps as Sue uses a missing-husband ploy to find a way to incorporate her story with the bigger press story to get the attention she feels she deserves.
At the end of the day, Sue Buttons gets way more than she bargained for as many lives are lost through collateral damage. The irony is that Buttons, who is indeed guilty of many things with the exception of murder, never accepts accountability for any of it while attempting to prove to the world that she is worthy of attention. Director Tate Taylor did an excellent job of providing several twists and turns that made a case for ruthless entertainment with exceptional humor by comedian Awkwafina (Mina). By making Sue a victim, hero, and enabler, he was able to cover lots of areas that appealed to the emotion of the audience. Rooting for the underdog became a global cause that provided humor as well as pity for every character in the film who had personal and social issues to overcome in this entire community’s cry for attention.
Now available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital
