Mark Reviews Movies: THE ESTATE (2022)

The Estate, Signature Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 4, 2022

What kind of favors did writer/director Dean Craig need to call in to assemble this cast for such a dead-end comedy? The Estate features the likes of Toni Collette, Anna Faris, Rosemarie DeWitt, and even Kathleen Turner as a wealthy and dying curmudgeon, whose fortune prompts a lot of bickering and scheming on the part of her greedy relatives. The cast, doing their best to sell one-note characters and gags that go flat almost as soon as they're introduced, might be the only element of positive note here. Even then, to what end are they working so hard and being such good sports?

Collette plays Macey, the co-owner of a restaurant with her sister Savanna, played by Faris. An animated credit sequence does a lot of expositional work, as we learn the sisters grew up in harmony with their extended family, took over the restaurant after the death of their father, and now risk losing it because they can't afford loan payments.

We get a sense of both women right away, as Macey has failed to convince the bank to show mercy and a late-to-the-meeting Savanna responds to the bad news by storming into the bank, throwing a cup of coffee in the manager's face, and kicking him in the groin. The joke is that Savanna goes into the wrong bank and assaults a complete stranger, but at least we know she's volatile and swears a lot. That's something. In fact, that's all there is to the character.

The setup is that the women's mother (played by Patricia French) informs them that their aunt, the mom's sister, Hilda (Turner) has cancer—all over. She'll be dead soon, and Savanna has the idea to warm up to Hilda after a long period of estrangement in order to try to get into her will. Macey finds the idea distasteful, but with the restaurant and her father's legacy on the line, she agreees.

The rest of the story probably doesn't need to be explained. Of course, there are other family members trying to do the same thing, and obviously, they compete for Hilda's attention and final bouts of affection. Pretty much everyone's terrible in some way. Hilda herself is a bitter, judgmental customer, who's so miserable and callous that no one really seems to care that she's dying.

Without any kids of her own, her nieces and nephews are the likely inheritors of the estate. Beatrice (DeWitt) has already arrived at the aunt's house to attend to Hilda's every need with her husband James (Ron Livingston), a chef who seems like the only decent one of the bunch. That thinking goes out the window when he agrees to try to have sex with Hilda at the command of his wife. James is outraged by the mere suggestion of that as a possibility, but since Craig's screenplay has to keep inventing awkward and uncomfortable situations, the character has a sudden, complete reversal for a scene that, thankfully, goes nowhere. His return to being the voice of moral reason is transparently disingenuous after that.

The other competition is Richard (David Duchovny), who prefers to go by "Dick." That's the joke.

Well, the other joke is that Dick has carried a flame for Macey, his cousin, since childhood, and the real gag is that his unrequited love for one cousin is probably actually just a fetish for that specific kind of incest. Watching Duchovny play the slimy pervert is somewhat amusing, if only because—like the rest of the cast—he's so invested in the material.

The material fails everyone, though, with jokes that just keep repeating, whether they were funny or, almost certainly in just about every case, not. Hilda continues to be terrible. Beatrice continues to scheme and show no sense of decency. Savanna does the same, but her vocabulary is more vulgar as she does so. The big setpiece here revolves around Bill (Danny Vinson), a man on whom Hilda had a crush in high school. Savanna and Macey think setting up their aunt on a date with him will buy them some favor, but as it turns out, the guy's a registered sex offender now. In case that isn't unfunny enough, the lengthy climax—which one can see coming a mile away, because the movie's tendency to go as randomly low as possible becomes inherently predictable—involves trying to get the old man's penis out of his pants.

Whatever the favors—since it surely couldn't have been the screenplay—that put all of these actors into The Estate, they must have been sizeable. Craig should owe everyone here even more after this.

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