Review: ‘Buffaloed’ Is Wishy-Washy About the Narcotic Power of Capitalism

Sustaining a tone of freewheeling, amoral zaniness is difficult for many American filmmakers, as one can often see an inevitable moral lesson approaching not too far in the horizon, rendering the anarchy moot. Such is the problem with Tanya Wexler’s Buffaloed. Wexler and screenwriter Brian Sacca aim for an intimate comedy of American madness, in which we’re to root for a protagonist who strives to get rich by scamming poor folk, but they don’t have the daring to follow that premise through to its logical conclusions, as Martin Scorsese did in The Wolf of Wall Street. Instead, they allow their characters to learn the usual humanist lessons, in the process eliding the ramifications of their scenario.

Peg (Zoey Deutch), a young spitfire living in Buffalo, New York, is from a broken, working-class home, and she’s desperate to move up the ladder. An aspiring entrepreneur, she gets into an Ivy League college, but she’s jailed for running a counterfeit football ticket scam to raise money for the tuition. Upon release, Peg looks for work, initially cleaning toilets for the local bar run by her earnest brother, JJ (Noah Reid), until a phone call from a collection agency inspires her to swing by the company’s office and ingratiate herself with its ringleader, Wizz (Jai Courtney). Soon, Peg is using her hustling instincts to collect on long-ignored debts. As Wizz says in one of the film’s many signpost lines: “Debt doesn’t die.”

Like The Wolf of Wall Street’s antihero, Peg breaks the fourth wall to talk to the audience, describing debt collection as an elaborate, barely regulated framework of scams. Buffaloed is promising when it’s offering such concrete details, but Wexler too often fast-forwards through these sequences. Peg does four years in prison, and nearly goes to war with another inmate, Backer (Lorrie Odom), over the sale of black-market goods, but these incidents are glossed over in seconds, and the crushing pain that Peg might have felt as an inmate goes unexplored. When Peg forms her own collection agency, she does so seemingly with virtually no complications. And, later, when Peg’s scams later hurt her family, JJ and her mother, Kathy (Judy Greer), who both have vulnerable businesses, these developments are also eventually shrugged off so that Peg can be forgiven and allow for an obligatory happy ending.

Wexler wants it both ways: Peg is supposed to be edgy and (initially) ruthless, yet we’re also supposed to eventually accept her as an un-ironic hero. The Wolf of Wall Street and Robert Zemeckis’s 1980 film Used Cars, another probable model for Buffaloed, weren’t stymied by such concerns. The characters in those films are monsters, whom we like anyway for their astonishing devotion to their own monstrosity. By encouraging this division in us, between our common moral sense and our addiction to visceral self-aggrandizement and selfishness, these films offered an inherent comment on the narcotic power of capitalism.

Wexler’s wishy-washiness strands Deutch, who’s in danger of being typecast as a thinly drawn, motor-mouthed hottie. Because the film’s foundation is essentially sentimental, Deutch’s junior shark routine lacks a bite, and she seems too eager to please. Courtney is much more vivid, informing Wiz with a primordial macho oiliness that’s both funny and dangerous; as the film’s true villain, he’s freed from the shackles of the narrative’s preachiness. Bit players—as judges, crooks, and rabid Buffalo Bills fans—are also amusing, as they’re given borderline surreal sketches that parody the tribalism of the city, such as when Peg’s lawyer loses her case for choosing the wrong Buffalo wings joint. Such moments suggest the lunatic comedy that might’ve been, had Peg not been required by the screenplay to grow a standard-issue heart.