Mooch begins with a nature documentary on television, as a female narrator describes what the title means in terms of animal behaviour. For after a mother bird has caught a worm to feed to her chick, another wagtail, “the mooch of the forest”, flies in and steals her prey, exercising its “inner desire for a short cut”, and exhibiting a kind of parasitic conduct that is unlikely to change because “once a mooch, always a mooch”. This wagtail is living off the efforts of others expressly in ‘the Garden State’ which is also the home of protagonist Shane (played by the film’s writer/director Jeff Ryan), the film’s other mooch.
Near thirty, yet still working as a golf caddie with colleagues who are all nearly half his age, and struggling even to keep that job, Shane relies on his long-suffering girlfriend Leslie (Katerina Tannenbaum) to pay their rent while he, instead of covering their utilities bills, siphons water with a hose from the neighbour’s pipes. Constantly late for work, he has to be reminded again and again by his manager Jordan (L James) that “the early bird catches the worm”, and is at several points lured in by a decidedly worm-like piece of jewellery hanging from a locker. For, like the wagtail in the documentary, Shane always takes the laziest route to what he wants, and typically gets it through opportunistic theft rather than hard work.
All this changes when Don Simisomo (Scott Cohen), a rich local business owner, realises that his wallet has been picked by Shane in the golf course’s locker room, and instead of getting the feckless caddie fired, hires him for a private assignment. Tasked with getting dirt on Don’s ex-wife Sheila (Geneva Carr), Shane turns amateur detective, albeit one still riding a child’s bicycle with basket. Shane becomes ever more entangled in the affairs of Don and Sheila as well as of their young adult children Dina (Molly Brown) and Joey (Ashby Gentry), and Don’s frat buddies/business partners/golf rivals Larry (Will Chase) and Hollis (Charlie Pollock), even as he is himself tailed by a mysterious moustachioed figure (Louis Cancelmi) and a no-nonsense debt collector (Justin Sulham).
It is not long before Shane has a bandage across his nose like Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) – and indeed what ensues is a slacker noir akin to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice (2014) or David Robert Mitchell’s Under The Silver Lake (2018), except set far from Los Angeles in the altogether less alluring milieu of New Jersey. “Time to grow up,” Shane says to his own image in the mirror, as he decides to become the kind of employed, solvent, responsible husband material that Leslie would like him to be – and indeed this public dick proves surprisingly good at being a private one, eventually connecting all the dots in a convoluted but pleasingly low-to-no-stakes scenario. Yet Shane is also a mooch, and once a mooch, always a mooch.
strap: Jeff Ryan’s noirish comedy sees a feckless 29-year-old golf caddie turn private dick in a quixotic quest to grow up
© Anton Bitel
