As an actor, John Slattery has never appeared in a movie directed by the Coen brothers, but judging from his new film, he clearly aims to emulate their work. Maggie Moore(s), Slattery's second directorial feature, works so hard to be the next Fargo that the strain shows early, and oftentimes, to the movie's detriment. Screenwriter Paul Bernbaum doesn't have the Coens's wit or their way with unique characters, and Slattery doesn't quite have a handle on the movie's tone. Still, Maggie Moore(s) is a mostly pleasant, laid-back viewing experience, despite a plot that involves a pair of gruesome murders.
Slattery doesn't show up onscreen in Maggie Moore(s), instead giving the lead role to his Mad Men co-star Jon Hamm. Hamm plays Jordan Sanders, the chief of police in an Arizona town who's faced with two murder victims who inexplicably have the same name. Hamm gave a fantastic performance as a snarky small-time detective in last year's hilarious, underappreciated Confess, Fletch, and brings energy and charm to this more sensitive and subdued character. There's not much to the murder mystery in Maggie Moore(s), but Hamm carries the movie with his affable screen presence.
The murders of the two women named Maggie Moore aren't a mystery to the audience, although Maggie Moore(s) opens with the second Maggie (Mary Holland) being killed by an unseen attacker. The movie then flashes back to 10 days earlier, when local sub-shop franchisee Jay Moore (Micah Stock) is experiencing a bit of a crisis. To save money at his floundering restaurant, he's been buying expired food instead of the authorized product from the corporate office, and pays his black-market contact Tommy T (Derek Basco) by passing along sealed envelopes that turn out to contain child pornography. Jay's wife, Maggie (Louisa Krause), finds the latest delivery and threatens to go to the police, so Jay goes through Tommy T to hire a deaf enforcer named Kosco (Happy Anderson) to scare Maggie away from the idea.
The clearly psychopathic Kosco doesn't stop at intimidation, though, killing Maggie and burning her body inside her car in the middle of the desert. Like Fargo's Jerry Lundegaard, Jay isn't a seasoned criminal, and he freaks out when his plan turns deadly. His questionable solution to throw suspicion elsewhere is to send Kosco after another woman named Maggie Moore who happens to live in the same town. After Kosco kills the second Maggie, attention shifts to her husband Andy (Christopher Denham), who has a couple of potential motives for wanting his wife dead.
Maggie Moore(s) lays out all of these events clearly for the audience to see, so viewers are always one step ahead of Jordan and his partner (Ted Lasso's Nick Mohammed) as they try to piece together the strange case. The entertainment value of Maggie Moore(s) comes not in figuring out the whodunit, but in watching these bumbling criminals and only slightly less bumbling cops attempt to outmaneuver each other. As a tragic figure, Jay is no Jerry Lundegaard, and his plight is mostly just pathetic. Holland's Maggie gets a bit more screen time than Krause's, but both of them are more plot devices than characters.
Hamm and Mohammed make up for it by creating interesting, amusing characters, with an undercurrent of melancholy. Jordan is a widower who's still processing his wife's death, in part by writing thinly veiled autobiographical stories for an adult-education creative writing class. He forms a personal connection with friendly divorcee Rita (Tina Fey), Jay and Maggie's neighbor who overhears the loud arguments that precipitate the initial crime.
Hamm and Fey, who previously played a much goofier couple on 30 Rock, have appealing chemistry, and the tentative romance between two middle-aged people who aren't sure how to navigate being single again is far more engaging than the forgettable crime story. The two elements come together in the climax, but they never fit together well enough to make Maggie Moore(s) work as a cohesive narrative.
With its somewhat distasteful crime story that begins with child pornography, Maggie Moore(s) is never quite as funny as it's presented to be, and Slattery can't pull off the whimsical yet gruesome tone. Early in the movie, Jordan admonishes his partner for making light of the horrific murders of the two Maggies, and Maggie Moore(s) itself seems to have a similar problem figuring out the proper approach to the material. An opening title card claims that "some of this actually happened," but the movie's true-crime credentials are dubious at best, taking only the sketchiest details from a real-life unsolved case. As Jordan says, the Maggies would have been better off resting in peace, and Maggie Moore(s) could have been a perfectly enjoyable quirky small-town romance.
Maggie Moore(s) opens Friday, June 16, in select theaters and on VOD.