WATCH THE TRAILER

GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 8/10/07)

In the wake of the misconceived, bloated, too-many-chefs disaster that was his "remake" of The Stepford Wives, fleeing to England must have seemed like a very good idea for director Frank Oz. I mean, I'm sure he didn't flee, really, but the project that brought him back to the land of his birth (that's right, kids, Yoda's a Brit) — a small-budgeted, small-scale ensemble comedy — must have looked like a good way to regain some professional perspective and maybe even sanity. Although Oz the director hasn't exactly been on a roll in the new century, he has made a handful of tolerable-to-inspired comedies over the years, from What About Bob to Bowfinger. Such a project as this one could be just the thing to bring about the frequently desired "return to form."

Alas, Death, from a screenplay by Dean Craig, turns out to be only partially such a thing. A good portion of the movie whizzes with comic verve if not what you could call inventiveness. (One plot point features a mislabeled pill bottle that various characters help themselves to, not realizing what they think is valium is in fact a hallucinogenic cocktail — where have you heard that one before?) But its most hilarious set pieces invariably peter out just at the point where even higher peaks of hilarity could have been reached, whereupon the film settles into a lukewarm bath of sentimentality.

Things begin farcically enough, with funeral managers delivering the wrong coffin to the country house where Daniel (MacFayden, the dashing Mr. Darcy of 2005's Pride and Prejudice, here playing lumpy and deferential) lives with his wife (Hawes, his real-life spouse), his mother (Asher, who's looking damn good — Paul McCartney could do worse than to look up his longtime ex), and, up until recently, his father, he of the titular funeral. This cock-up is the gateway for many, many more, as the array of mourners includes Daniel's egoist novelist brother Robert (Graves), whose first-class airfare from New York represented the funds with which he had promised to pay for half of the funeral; a couple of cousins, one a secret drug dealer (Marshall), the other a nice yuppie (Donovan) whose fiancée, of whom her uptight dad already disapproves, is the first one to get the acid combo everyone believes is Valium (Tudyk, giving an outlandishly convincing account of a freak-out); a hypochondriac pal (Nyman) and his sleazebag buddy (Bremner), who's after the nice yuppie; a sclerotic, wheelchair-bound uncle (Vaughan), and a diminutive fellow nobody seems to know but who holds an interesting secret concerning the dearly departed (Dinklage).

Oz keeps all these balls in the air pretty deftly, and the cast tears into it. What gums things up is Craig's script; the writer seems to think that he needs to grind things to a halt now and then to make a point about the importance of family or some other such rot. It's as if you're reading a good rollicking Wodehouse story and all of a sudden you're in the tail end of a bad greeting card. Comedy of this sort thrives on ruthless momentum. Applying the brakes to "say" something might seem high-minded, but it's actually dumb. The dumbness doesn't kill Death at a Funeral, but it certainly weakens it.

— Glenn Kenny