Cora Bora: Megan Stalter Would’ve Been Funnier with a Better Script
By Liz Braun
Rating: B
Fans of Megan Stalter will be ecstatic over Cora Bora, an indie comedy about a hopeless musician trying to recover her girlfriend and somehow pull her own life together.
If you know Stalter from HBO's Hacks then you know the general territory. In this case, the whole movie is Stalter and while her bizarre charm is formidable, it’s not quite enough to carry everything — a stronger script might have helped.
Cora (Stalter) is an unmade bed in human form making her way through life, and just about everyone who interacts with her eventually asks, “What’s wrong with you?”
Badly organized, dithering, and dissembling, deluded about her singing talent and dancing through it all by the seat of her pants, Cora is fabulously annoying and weird. And yet simultaneously attractive. That must be because of her self-confidence, which is as unexpected and confusing as everything else about her.
She’s like some millennial, work-in-progress version of Gena Rowlands for beauty and bluster, and under every nonsensical, self-protective statement is a tiny kernel of truth.
Cora has left Portland and moved to Los Angeles in support of a music career that appears to be going nowhere. Her lovelife is likewise rudderless; she’s in an “open relationship” with long-time girlfriend Justine (Jojo T. Gibbs ) that is disintegrating, considering how Justine, back in Portland, never answers her calls. Cora fills time on Tinder dates and has sex with terrible men. That may be redundant.
Anyway, Cora then gets dropped by her agent.
In an attempt to salvage what’s left of her scattered existence, Cora flies home to Portland, unannounced, to surprise Justine. Justine has just finished grad school and there’s going to be a party at the house the two women used to share.
When she gets home, Cora discovers she’s been replaced in Justine’s life by a beautiful massage therapist named Riley (Ayden Mayeri).
To add insult to injury, in Portland she discovers that her parents, who are still friends of Justine’s, are now fond of Riley and are her massage clients.
Cora is an agent of chaos. Back in Portland she loses the family dog, helps ruin the grad party, wanders into a group sex scenario (note cameo from Margaret Cho), and generally promotes upheaval wherever she goes.
Still, the kindness of semi-strangers like Tom (Manny Jacinto), who keeps crossing paths with Cora by accident, eventually helps her talk about the grief that underlies all her frantic activity.
It’s a bit of a U-turn, narrative-wise, but Stalter is up to the challenge of sudden drama. Cora Bora has a strong support cast that includes Chelsea Peretti, Thomas Mann, Heather Elizabeth Morris and Darrell Hammond.
Cora Bora. Directed by Hannah Pearl Utt. Written by Rhianon Jone. Starring Megan Stalter, Jojo T. Gibbs, Ayden Mayeri, Manny Jacinto. Available on VOD and digital July 16.