Movie Log: Death at a Funeral

Death at a Funeral came along to my mailbox, only a day or two after I'd expected it, so The Wife and I watched it immediately and sent it back into the Netflix machine, to pop up in someone else's mailbox.

It's a pleasant comedy, dark grey rather than actually black, about the members of a British family who gather when one of the older generation (father to the most important character, Matthew Macfayden's David) dies. David and his wife Jane (Kelly Hawes) have been living with David's mother (Sandra, played by Jane Asher) for an undisclosed amount of time, and what they do for a living is also left vague. (David has written a novel, but that's all we know.) And yet they may have trouble now paying for an apartment of their own, which would normally make me think they're horribly bad at managing money -- but the movie's not about that, so I accepted it as background.

Other important characters include David's younger brother, the successful novelist Robert (Rupert Graves); Howard (Andy Nyman), who seems to be a friend of the family; cousin Martha (Daisy Donovan) and her soon-to-be-fiance Simon (Alan Tudyk); and Martha's ne'er-do-well younger brother Troy (Kris Marshall), who is training to be a pharmacist.

With that many folks jockeying about (and I haven't even gotten to Martha's father or the character played by Peter Dinklage, who had an unexpected connection to the dead man), Funeral doesn't have time for sensitive depictions of characters -- and that's not what it's there for. It's a slightly tonier, British version of the kind of adult comedy that Americans used to be able to make through the '70s and '80s. ("Adult" here meaning "for grown-ups," and not "involving bodily fluids.") It's not a doors-slamming farce, but there are a couple of plotlines, and most of them get slapstick and broad at least once. The actors are solid enough to make it work; it never gets too silly for its own good.

Frank Oz is the director, and he brings his usual classy but unspectacular competence to the proceedings. There's nothing here to greatly advance the course of cinema, but it's a very entertaining comedy. And there's a great unexpectedly hilarious moment near the end that was set up perfectly and put aside, like a palmed card by a magician.