Judy Greer in Grating Tabloid-Inspired Comedy

Too much cinematic quirkiness tends to bring out the Lou Grant in me. To jog your memory, when Ed Asner’s character met Mary Tyler Moore for the first time on her classic sitcom, he told her, “You know what, you got spunk.” She hems and haws for a moment before he snarls, “I hate spunk!”

That’s how I felt watching Edd Benda and Stephen Helstad’s relentlessly quirky dark comedy receiving its world premiere at SXSW. You can tell that the filmmakers were going for a Coen Brothers vibe with this comically violent crime tale set in the Midwest (Wisconsin, specifically). With the exception of the central character played by Judy Greer, all the figures onscreen display the sort of eccentricities that are presumably meant to be either amusing or endearing but instead simply come across as odd.

Inspired by a 2005 real-life incident in San Jose, Chili Finger lives up to its title with its storyline involving Jess (Greer), a small-town divorce lawyer struggling with empty nest syndrome after sending her daughter (Shaya Harris) off to college. Even worse, she and her sad-sack husband Ron (Sean Astin) are in such dire financial straits that they can’t even afford to visit her on Parents Weekend.

So it seems a divine gift, albeit a gross one, when she discovers, you guessed it, a severed human finger in the bowl of chili served to her at the fast-food restaurant the couple frequents. It doesn’t take long before Blake Jr. II (Madeline Wise), the daughter of the restaurant’s owner, to show up to take charge of the situation. She offers the couple restaurant coupons, which Ron, who all but lives for their food, is happy to accept. But Jess presses for more, finally receiving an offer of $10,000. And then Ron somehow blunders his way into getting the number jacked up to $100,000 in return for their silence.

That doesn’t sit well with the colorful Blake Jr. (John Goodman, in full tough-guy mode), who prides himself on the restaurant’s motto, “It’s not fast food, it’s good food!” He smells a rat and dispatches his gun-toting, ex-Marine buddy Dave (Bryan Cranston, sporting a handlebar moustache to signify kookiness) to get to the bottom of things.

The situation grows ever more convoluted as Dave sniffs around and eventually discovers that things aren’t as they initially appeared. Throughout the ensuing violent mayhem, Jess, along with an injured factory worker (Paul Stanko) who figures in the proceedings, desperately tries to keep things under control and fails miserably. By the end of the story, characters have been shot, pierced by arrows, gored by a deer, and nearly burned to death in a barn fire. You begin to wonder when someone is going to be thrown into a wood chipper.

The relatively unknown directors — who previously collaborated on a feature, Superior, and a documentary, The Kid’s Table — have somehow attracted a stellar cast for this comedy that strains for the outrageousness of its tabloid-inspired title. You can feel the performers working extra hard to put the material over — especially Goodman and Cranston, who have plenty of experience with this sort of off-kilter black humor but are here undone by the unfunny script. Goodman in particular plays it so darkly that his scenes have a jarring quality.

Astin sinks into his pathetic character with full commitment, but the running gag about Ron getting more upset about the possibility of being banned from the fast-food restaurant than anything else is hammered so relentlessly that the character just seems mentally challenged.  

Only Greer, an undeclared national treasure, manages to rise above the material and deliver a fully dimensional, sympathetic portrait of a woman desperately trying to keep things together but finding herself caught up in circumstances way beyond her control. Adroitly balancing humor and pathos, her performance brings the only real human element to the overly contrived proceedings.