Death at a Funeral

An effective farce is a comic contraption that largely runs on its own crude mechanics. The surprises and sight gags, however they are discharged, are more important than the actors and the direction.
Casting is a matter of filling in blanks. Some comedians, when they slip on a banana peel, look more ridiculous than others. But it’s still a banana peel, and a pratfall is a pratfall. Making the whole creaky device run smoothly is mostly a matter of greasing the machinery.
This slapdash remake of the 2007 film “Death at a Funeral” is a case in point. All it requires of the actors is the ability to carry off a hamminess that sustains a jolly comic tone. The original movie, directed by Frank Oz from a screenplay by Dean Craig, imagined the most embarrassing possible chain of comic horrors at a funeral attended by proper Britons.

Aaron (Chris Rock) is about to have the worst day of his life, and it’s not because he has to give his father’s eulogy. Following his father’s last request to hold his funeral at home, he is about to play guest to a pressure cooker of unresolved family tension, accidental drug overdose and at least one funeral crasher.

The central idea of a funeral that goes horribly awry still works, mixing black comedy and broad farce liberally but at such a steady pace that by the point where naked men are threatening to jump off the roof nothing seems out of place. Or at least not artificially so. It’s also got a firm sense of family pain and pleasure (mostly pain) and knows how to dial up the tension without ever falling into melodrama, though family matriarch Cynthia (Loretta Devine) pushes that envelope quite a bit.

It’s also got quite a bit of chemistry between its cast members, with more than a couple of stand-outs. Sad-sack Oscar (James Marsden) is designed to be a scene stealer and for the most part he is. Part of that is the natural zaniness built into his situation but a great deal of it is in the performance and Marsden pulls it off. Columbus Short also makes great use of what screen time he gets as the pharmacology student responsible for Oscar’s problems.

Still, LaBute knows how to do macabre comedy and most of the real highlights still hit in a mixture of high and low humor that is well-designed and delivered, and that is much harder to do than it should be. The less familiar you are with the original the better the new one will come off, and in and of itself, it entertains. A little more tweaking for the actual actor’s voices to come through, instead of trying to put them into pre-concieved places, may have worked better, but on the whole, it’s still an excellent example of how the ensemble comedy should work.