Spring Break
Chaos reigns supreme in Death at a Funeral
Issue date: 9/20/07
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From Harvey to A Fish Called Wanda, Some Like It Hot to Meet the Parents, the art of disastrous comedy has been honed through the progression of modern cinema to dull perfection. Have we yet reached the summit of this kind of humor? Has it been overused, fated soon to go the way of slapstick, toilet jokes and Adam Sandler movies? We turn to Frank Oz, whose previous directorial work includes such disastrously comedic masterpieces as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and What About Bob?, and his latest film, Death at a Funeral, for an answer.
From its onset, the film wastes absolutely no time in pretending to be anything other than a comedy of errors. It opens on Daniel (Matthew MacFadyen) overseeing the arrival of his father's coffin, borne by a team of four morticians into an ivy-covered English cottage. Opening the lid for one last look, Daniel naturally discovers that the undertakers have delivered the wrong corpse. His wife Jane (Keeley Hawes) attempts to soothe his agitation with the morticians, his apprehension at having to deliver the eulogy, his self-deprecatory envy of his not-yet-arrived novelist brother, and his general sense of grief, all while gently pressuring him to call a landlord to put a deposit down for a flat so that the couple can escape Daniel's frigidly reticent mother, Sandra (Jane Asher).
All of this happens in approximately two minutes of hurried dialogue. If Death has one fatal flaw it's the film's uncontrolled frenzy of plotlines. It's as though the script's writers couldn't or wouldn't throw any ideas out, and instead chose to jam-pack the work with minimally-addressed, yet-somehow-intersecting subplots.
Consider this: the above scene cuts without transition to a pair of men, one of whom - Howard, played by Andy Nyman - neurotically obsesses about a patch of discolored skin on his wrist, while the other - Justin, played by Ewen Bremner - neurotically chain smokes and obsesses about seeing "Martha," a beloved one-night stand, at the funeral.
From its onset, the film wastes absolutely no time in pretending to be anything other than a comedy of errors. It opens on Daniel (Matthew MacFadyen) overseeing the arrival of his father's coffin, borne by a team of four morticians into an ivy-covered English cottage. Opening the lid for one last look, Daniel naturally discovers that the undertakers have delivered the wrong corpse. His wife Jane (Keeley Hawes) attempts to soothe his agitation with the morticians, his apprehension at having to deliver the eulogy, his self-deprecatory envy of his not-yet-arrived novelist brother, and his general sense of grief, all while gently pressuring him to call a landlord to put a deposit down for a flat so that the couple can escape Daniel's frigidly reticent mother, Sandra (Jane Asher).
All of this happens in approximately two minutes of hurried dialogue. If Death has one fatal flaw it's the film's uncontrolled frenzy of plotlines. It's as though the script's writers couldn't or wouldn't throw any ideas out, and instead chose to jam-pack the work with minimally-addressed, yet-somehow-intersecting subplots.
Consider this: the above scene cuts without transition to a pair of men, one of whom - Howard, played by Andy Nyman - neurotically obsesses about a patch of discolored skin on his wrist, while the other - Justin, played by Ewen Bremner - neurotically chain smokes and obsesses about seeing "Martha," a beloved one-night stand, at the funeral.
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