"Fine is like mediocrity's dumb cousin."
"Hey - What's the difference between a hooker and a debt collector? A hooker takes your money before she screws you."
— Wizz
Buffaloed is an American crime comedy film directed by Tanya Wexler. It debuted at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival before a theatrical release in 2020.
Peg Dahl (Zoey Deutch) is a financial whiz who once dreamed of making it out of Buffalo, NY's blue-collar community by getting an Ivy League education and working on Wall Street. But after a failed con lands her in prison, she winds up working at a debt collection agency run by the devious thug Wizz (Jai Courtney). After Wizz wrongs her, Peg resolves to take him down by starting her own legitimate clean agency — no matter what her mother Kathy (Judy Greer), brother JJ (Noah Reid), or budding boyfriend (who is also an ADA pursuing the city's debt collectors) Graham (Jermaine Fowler) think about it.
Tropes:
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Peg takes a moment to explain to the audience how the debt collection biz works, complete with presentation slides showing the people involved. Near the end of the movie, she also talks to the audience as she tries to think of what to do with the seed money she has just been gifted.
- Burn Baby Burn: Peg dramatically burns the debt papers the cops collected as evidence, freeing thousands of people from around a billion dollars in debt.
- Dating Catwoman: Graham and Peg have chemistry, but he refuses to date her because he's trying to take down the city's seedy debt collectors and he's not sure if her business is clean or not.
- Dictionary Opening: The film opens on multiple definitions of "buffalo" — the animal, the city in New York, and to intimidate someone.
- Engineered Public Confession: Peg gathers the city's debt collectors at the bar and gets them to spill some of their more devious tactics. What they don't know is that the cops are watching them through a camera hidden in the buffalo head she's brought to the meeting. And because she all got them to agree to work together, they also now qualify for an additional racketeering charge.
- Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: JJ is the humble, hardworking Responsible to his sister Peg's Foolish; he just wants to own a bar and can't fathom how she just defaults to scamming and using people to achieve her goal of being rich.
- How We Got Here: The film opens on Peg cussing, running somewhere, and firing a gun in the air. Her narration then stops the film and rewinds to the events that got her there.
- Humble Goal: When Peg takes JJ to dinner, she tells him that they could own a dozen bars with the money. He laments that he's fine with just owning one and being happy.
- The One Who Made It Out: Peg's opening narration tells the audience that she wants to make it out of the disappointing, lower class lout-filled city of Buffalo by getting an Ivy education and working on Wall Street. Unfortunately, landing in prison for a petty scam severely limits her options afterwards.
- Relative Error: Graham sees Peg and JJ roughhousing at the bar and calls the cops, assuming it to be a "spousal altercation". They have to clarify that they are sister and brother.
- Scatterbrained Senior: Peg collects a large debt from an old lady with memory problems. It is later revealed that the men at the debt collection agency have been "collecting" that debt for twenty years because of this.
- Struggling Single Mother: Peg and JJ's mother, Kathy. Since their gambler of a father died, Kathy has been struggling to pay their debts and put food on the table with her off-the-books business. She also frets about her dishonest daughter.Kathy: Honey, do you honestly think that I didn't have a dream? Dreams don't make a lot of sense when you got two kids crying 'cause they're hungry and their dad just gambled away their supper money. We almost lost the house. I will be in debt for the rest of my life. He played grab ass with my clients so much that they didn't show up for their appointments after a while. I know you think that your dad was some kind of Prince Charming, but you are old enough to know that he was an asshole.
