Death at a Funeral

Following in the footsteps of The Valet and Hot Fuzz, Frank Oz's Death at a Funeral marks yet another gut-busting European comedy that completely trumps the stateside comedic output so far this year (save of course the brilliant Knocked Up). Death at a Funeral is an old-fashioned, go-for-broke farce that takes a host of wacky characters and outlandish scenarios and thrusts them into one big melting pot of comic awkwardness. The result is a fast-moving and biting comedy that thrashes all around the world of morbidity while staying just fanciful enough not to become moribund.

Oz is an established director who certainly knows his way around a good American comedy (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Bowfinger) and here, he makes a splendidly smooth transition into handling his first British comedy by deftly juggling a large ensemble of characters gathered at a posh English estate to observe the funeral of a much beloved patriarch. In the same manner that farcical multi-character/large estate films 8 Women and The Celebration succeeded, Oz makes the viewer invested in the characters without having to sympathize.

Daniel (Matthew Macfadyen) and Robert (Rupert Graves, V for Vendetta) are the two sons in charge of putting on the funeral. Daniel is the mild-mannered and dutiful one while Robert is the self-centered successful novelist Daniel dreams he could be. It's a stressful day for Daniel. He not only has to oversee the friends and family arriving for the funeral, he's also in charge of giving the eulogy; something everyone expected Robert to do. He's even being badgered about a non-funeral related issue from his wife, Jane (Keely Hawes, Tristram Shandy), who is determined that they finally move out of the family estate and into a flat of their own. But things really get hectic for Daniel when a mysterious stranger named Peter (Peter Dinklage, The Station Agent) arrives at the funeral with the intention to blackmail Daniel through the revelation of a closely guarded secret pertaining to the recently deceased.

The rest of the ensemble is made up of a wide range of eccentrics that include the cantankerous wheelchair bound Uncle Alfie (Peter Vaughan), the shaggy chemistry student/drug dealer Troy (Kris Marshall, Love Actually) and the timid Simon (Alan Tudyk), who winds up shedding his inhibitions thanks to an accidental hallucinogenic overdose.

The entire cast is worthy of praise but the standouts include Tudyk and Macfadyen. Tudyk, one of the few Americans in the cast, has the showiest role in the film and he takes full advantage of this. As he has displayed previously in A Knight's Tale and Knocked Up, Tudyk has the ability to put a fresh spin on otherwise tired jokes through his carefully nuanced line delivery. Meanwhile, the puffy, doe-eyed Macfadyen is so effortlessly nebbish you'd never expect he could have the smoldering mystique to play Mark Darcy,

let alone a secret service agent in MI-5.

As is the norm for broad comedy, most of the events that unfold are contrived to an extravagant degree but the laughs that ensue are consistently hearty enough that it hardly matters. The film's one major misstep is a last minute bid for sincerity that's admirable but misguided. The problem is simply that the movie is too funny for such a conclusion. More in tone would be for Macfadyen to pull a complete Basil Fawlty on the family and have things end as cringingly painful as possible. Nevertheless, Death at a Funeral is one of the year's funniest films and a perfect movie theater excursion for a hot summer night.

Movie Grade: B+

Synopsis:

Chaos ensues when a man tries to expose a dark secret regarding a recently deceased patriarch of a dysfunctional British family.