Death at a Funeral: Dead Funny
Frank Oz Directs a Memorial Service You’ll Never Forget.
Sep 8, 2008 Rashelle Predovnik
Winner of The US Comedy Arts Festival in 2007, funerals don’t get any funnier than this.
A Tense Beginning:
The film opens to moments before the funeral of a recently deceased elderly man. It's an event that brings together his whole dysfunctional family and inevitably family tensions and issues arise. Daniel (MacFadyen) is the sensitive brother, who lives with his mum and secretly dreams of penning a famous novel. His sweet and supportive wife Jane (Hawes) is desperate for them to put a deposit down on their own flat so they can move away from her unfriendly mother in law Sandra (Asher). The other brother Robert (Graves) is greatly admired by the family as a famous and successful author who lives in New York and has flown in for the funeral. Constant comparisons by the family between the two brothers ensure that Daniel lives in his brother’s shadow and the tension upon Roberts arrival is almost immediate.
Add to the sibling rivalry, an array of other family members and friends, who comprise an assortment of different personalities and issues, and the mix becomes explosive.
There are too many A-Class actors to name in this film but a few exceptional moment come from the veteran character actor Peter Vaughan, who is hilarious as the cantankerous, rude and abusive Uncle Alfie. Alan Tudyk is also great as Simon, the naked, paranoid, hallucinating social misfit who wrecks havoc at the funeral, and that’s just at the beginning of the film!
A Progression Into Mayhem:
The film progresses as the relatives congregate and mingle, it doesn’t take long for the brothers to wonder who is the well spoken little midget that no one has ever seen before and what is he doing at the funeral? The film degenerates into a mad scramble for time as the brothers discover his identity and try to stop him from exposing a shocking secret about their father at the memorial service.
There are many difficult family relationships that come to a head during this film however the comic mileage is this film is largely driven by the stories frenetic pace as we jump from one disaster to the next. Farcical and at times absolutely absurd, it is hard not to laugh out aloud at many of the scenarios the characters unwillingly fall into. There are priceless moments in this situational comedy, with enough zany twists and turns to keep you sniggering until the very end.
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