Funeral celebrates the life of comedic mediocrity

Obvious jokes almost put the nail in film’s coffin

William O’Donnell, staff

Ah, best-laid intentions when playing towards conventions. This film is doing its darnedest to be a quaint, dark comedy but ends up pandering to easy jokes too often and cannot control the ebb and flow of the subject matter and gags.

The story surrounds the goings-on at a funeral (hence the title, obviously). The film wishes to set up a riveting ensemble cast as it introduces the likes of the two sons, one a famous novelist (Rupert Graves), the other yet to move out of his parents’ house (Matthew MacFadyen), their cousin (Daisy Donovan) and her secret fiancé (Alan Tudyk), who has accidentally ingested a hallucinogen, the pharmaceutical-student cousin who provided the drugs (Kris Marshall), the token buddy (Andy Nyman) who gets stuck with caring for the crotchety brother of the deceased (Peter Vaughn), and more in a cavalcade of would-be interesting characters.

The cast are extremely hit-and-miss and are almost entirely responsible for the success or failure of each joke. Not to leave out director Frank Oz, he has some explaining to do, too. In fact, I will specify on these broad statements by giving a perfect example of a needlessly failed joke. The aforementioned Nyman (a.k.a. “buddy”) character is sitting with the widow (Jane Asher) on an outdoor bench and breaks the ice by telling the story of another recent death and its bloody details. This scene could have been funnier if it played out with more of the Ricky Gervais type awkwardness that it is clearly trying to touch. The story, and indeed the whole scene, is embarrassing to watch and clearly superfluous to the film (hence my hinted agitation with Frank Oz and editor Beverley Mills) but could possibly have worked if they had taken maybe three of four small chunks of the story, maybe less, and mixed them with slight pauses that would suggest the buddy’s need to finish telling the story despite sensing that the gross subject matter might be inappropriate. That would have been the Gervais thing to do, and most likely the right thing, if cutting it was not an option.

This film often plays to the easy joke, and even resorts to some major gross out gags. The first act spends too much time trying to make the characters interesting and ultimately introduces too many. Such as those in a subplot about a friend-of-a-friend (Ewn Bremner) who wishes to reunite with Donovan’s character, could be eliminated all together without harming the film (in fact, it would probably help it).

There are bright moments, once some madcap action begins. Though using hallucinogens as a plot device may make for easy jokes and scenes that write themselves, they are spliced in fine enough and do not entirely distract from the humour that is achieved when dead bodies begin to get played with. I found myself laughing out loud in genuine joy at certain points and found that there were far more of these than frustrating scenes.

Peter Dinklage, who plays a blackmailer holding a secret about the deceased, is a strong character actor who I find to be more believable in his performance than those who get into far less ridiculous moments than him. He was one of very few who stood out in this “ensemble.”

Moments like the cheesy and typical ending eulogy made by MacFayden’s character and the bench scene I covered earlier make for bad examples but don’t spoil the whole bunch (to paraphrase a cliché). As I suggested before, this film contains more funny moments than it does groaners.

The film ends with Vaughn’s character naked on the roof of the family house after taking the same hallucinogenic drug that Tudyk’s character (and Dinklage’s, incidentally) took earlier in the film. This level of gag is pretty much the average for the film preceding it; a joke that is worth a chuckle but was not completely thought out when included.