Death at a Funeral

[rating:3]
Director: Frank Oz
Starring: Matthew Macfadyen , Andy Nyman, Alan Tudyk

Death at a Funeral starts out painfully slow, which is not generally a good sign for a farce. Fortunately, the promise of the bouncy caper music over the lame opening titles pays off, but not until after a goodly stretch of hardcore tedium.

Our first real shot in the film is a closeup of a blankfaced Matthew Macfayden as Daniel, a dutiful son about to take delivery of his father’s casket ahead of an in-home funeral service. Daniel and a number of the other mourners, mostly family and mostly en route to the house, provide a taste of the Murphy’s Law theme of the film, but it’s all flatter than day-old club soda. Frank Oz’s direction seems as bland as the chatter and petty annoyances the characters offer up.

The sense of nothing special being offered is epitomized by Andy Nyman as Howard. In the car with a freakish buddy, he blathers nonstop about venal concerns and makes inappropriate comments in the form of trite observations in such a way that he’s rendered—both in the actor’s look and the lines he’s given—as a cheap knockoff of the character Ricky Gervais ought to have internationally copyrighted by now. That Nyman grows on the audience as the story rises above itself doesn’t excuse how lame his introduction is.

The first bright spot is Alan Tudyk. Best known as Wash in Firefly and the movie followup, Serenity, and most seen (sorta) as the voice and physicality of Will Smith’s robot nemesis in I, Robot (no? How about Steve the Pirate in Dodgeball, then), the American puts on an arguable British accent and damn near steals the picture with outrageous physical comedy that finally get this farce of a farce off the ground.

From about the moment Tudyk falls hilariously, shall we say, under the weather, the movie starts coming alive. Its disparate dull characters are pulled together by increasingly outrageous circumstance, crashing into a mess of slapstick, absurdity, scatology (you’ve been warned) and outrage. By the time Oz and screenwriter Dean Craig work the cast into something of a Marx Brothers frenzy, you’re pretty glad to be in the theater.

Once the cast and plot gel, Oz’s hands-off directorial style works. Full-monty insanity does not need an auteur’s imprimatur. But in those early scenes, Oz justs lets his cast die on camera, muttering through a banal script. Even if the purpose was to sell us on the bone-dry mundanity of these middle-class Brits, there’s no excuse for letting the viewer down so much. Via screen-and-comic-writer John Rogers’ Kung Fu Monkey blog, I tripped over an old Slate article that explains that “the movie studios’ biggest profit center is not theatrical movies, or even DVD sales; it is TV licensing.” While this film seems destined for endless repetition on Comedy Central, few late-night TV junkies or unemployed mid-morning channel surfers will last longer than the first ten minutes before flipping to the infomercial on channel 86 to oggle the ab-bluster babes.

Thus, the ideal audience for this film is someone whose tastes run toward over-the-top British farce, yet whose patience rates like that of an Important Art Film connoisseur. The DVD will play just as well on your TV screen as the film will play in the theater, but you’re more likely to tough it out if you’ve already sank ten bucks and still haven’t finished your popcorn bucket.

Tags: comedy