Review of "Death at a Funeral"

And while we're on the subject of Frank Oz: Why is he so frequently drawn to films with gay subject matter, only to handle it so amateurishly? He's collaborated twice with gay screenwriter Paul Rudnick, but neither film reaches the heights of such Oz classics as What About Bob?, Bowfinger, or even The Muppets Take Manhattan. Rudnick's In & Out isn't aging very well, what with its ultra-tame approach to gay identity issues; if the film endures, it will be for Joan Cusack's scene-stealing, Oscar-nominated performance as Kevin Kline's jilted bride. The other Oz-Rudnick collaboration, the remake of The Stepford Wives, was an out-and-out disaster, succeeding neither as camp homage nor as subversive satire.

The only thing making Death at a Funeral's gay subplot remotely interesting is Dinklage, one of the most compelling performers working in film today. Unlike the little-person actors of an earlier age — Billy Barty, say — Dinklage dares you not to take him seriously for even an instant. Even when his size is used as an element of the physical comedy here — his body gets tossed about in an attempt to hide it from the funeral guests — one never has the sense that the movie is making sport of his height, and that has more to do with Dinklage's power to create a character (almost literally out of nothing, in this case) than anything else.

The characters in Death don't treat Dinklage's revelations any differently than if they had come from a tall woman — it's the adultery and blackmail, not the homosexuality and, uh, height difference that matter. But going out on a limb a bit and tweaking expectations (in a rude but still funny way) might have upped the comedy quotient a bit.

The screenplay often goes in circles when it could be advancing things. For instance, we see the deceased's wife (Jane Asher) being rudely snippy to her daughter-in-law early on (Offered a cup of tea, she responds, “There's one thing a cup of tea won't do, and that's bring back the dead.”), but nothing ever comes of it. There's also a big to-do about the fact that Daniel, and not famous writer Robert, is going to deliver the eulogy, obviously setting us up for a moment where Daniel finds his voice and shows that he, too, can write. But once we get there, the eulogy winds up being not particularly interesting, and thus the whole point is lost.

If anyone behind the scenes of Death at a Funeral deserves praise without reservation, it's the casting department, who has assembled a troupe of performers far better than Dean Craig's clunky script deserves. Besides Macfayden (whose plainness here will make him unrecognizable to those who swooned over his Mr. Darcy in the most recent big-screen Pride & Prejudice adaptation), Dinklage and Tudyk, Funeral spotlights the always-oddball Ewen Bremner (Trainspotting), Kris Marshall (as a hilariously shifty student pharmacist) and, most especially, Andy Nyman (Severance), whose frequent outbursts of exasperation are comic gems.

So for those of you keeping score at home, that's a cast heavy of comedic talent and a director with a reasonably decent comedy track record delivering a movie that's not very funny until the very end. If this were an actual funeral, audiences would be forgiven for wanting to go out and mill about the foyer until the big finish.

Duralde is the author of 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men.