LYT review: DEATH AT A FUNERAL (2010)

Color the movie black. Color me taken aback.

I swear, there were few movies this year I was looking LESS forward to than DEATH AT A FUNERAL. Not because I particularly dislike anyone involved (well, okay, maybe Martin Lawrence, just a bit), but because I saw the 2007 film that it’s a remake of, and it did not work for me. Not at all.

In my review of the original, which is often referred to as “British” despite the fact that its director is the American Frank Oz, who is England-born but not of a UK comedy mindset at all, I wrote:

“Certain things come to mind when one envisions a comedy set in England titled Death at a Funeral. You know, the kind of dark, sarcastic, gallows humor those Anglos are famous for; maybe a little inappropriate sex; some buttoned-up stick-in-the-mud being made a complete fool of -- that sort of thing. Unfortunately, director Frank Oz doesn't really have that sensibility. He seems to take his cues from the first five minutes or so of Four Weddings and a Funeral (i.e., Hugh Grant saying, "F***!" a lot), while ignoring the craftsmanship and character of the rest of that movie.

Oz lightens up every film he touches -- witness his big-screen adaptations of Little Shop of Horrors and The Stepford Wives, both of which omitted the truly dark endings of their source material. He'd rather have everyone hug and be friends at the end, which is mighty Christian of him, though it usually feels like a cop-out. So it's hardly a spoiler that the "death" element here establishes a dark path it promptly veers from. Oz was also famously the voice of Yoda, and he seems to take that whole "Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny" thing a mite seriously.”

So when I heard that Chris Rock was producing a remake with an all-black cast, and that Neil LaBute, of all people, was directing, I was less than enthused. However, I had forgotten my own closing line from the original review: “I can imagine a better movie based on a similar premise, but there's no way Frank Oz has it in him to make such a hypothetical beast.”

It turns out that Neil LaBute does. Mea culpa. I’ve been preemptively slamming the remake on Twitter, but now that I’ve seen it, I admit that I was wrong. The new DEATH AT A FUNERAL is every bit as profane as its predecessor, but it’s a hell of a lot funnier. Which is strange considering that the plot – briefly synopsized as: “at a funeral, everything that can go wrong does” -- is almost beat-for-beat exactly the same (so yes, Danny Glover shits on Tracy Morgan’s hand, in an equally gross reprise of the original’s most offensive scene; thankfully, the loogie-spit/swallow bit is not repeated). The key here, I think, is that LaBute and Rock have cast actors who are experienced at comedy, while Oz did not. Yes, there was Alan Tudyk, but I’ve never found him particularly appealing, perhaps because my first memory of him is as a mincing gay German in the otherwise would-be serious Sandra Bullock rehab movie 28 DAYS. James Marsden takes over the role here, as the nervous husband unwittingly fed hallucinogens, and the casting change works wonders, perhaps because we expect forced wackiness from Tudyk, while Marsden has a ball sending up his straight-man persona.

And about that guy I don’t often like – Martin Lawrence. I’ve always been annoyed by the way he tends to play completely obnoxious jerks that we’re supposed to like anyway, but here, he uses that tendency in the correct way, playing someone who is both well-liked and an obnoxious jerk, a celebrity author who’s also a cheap bastard and a bad brother to Chris Rock, who’s basically playing straight man to all the surrounding hijinks.

Ditto, more or less, with Luke Wilson, who plays a dry and boring character who thinks too highly of himself.

Tracy Morgan appears to be free-form monologuing quite a bit, which is good, because somebody needs to do something different from the original movie, and Danny Glover is better as an angry old man than Peter Vaughn was, even though he is saddled with an obligatory “getting’ too old for this shit” line (if he’s too old now, was he really too old 25 years ago?).

Mostly, though, I think the foul-mouthed, amusing-anger humor of the script works better in an urban, African-American cultural setting than a rural British one. Frank Oz seemed to think the entirety of the humor involved a bunch of stiff-upper lips uttering profanities, while actors like Lawrence, Morgan, and Rock are already known for not just having potty-mouths, but a dexterity with profanity that lets them embrace and riff on the dirty stuff rather than resisting it. Similarly, Britain doesn’t have much of a comedy tradition regarding angry old men, at least not one I’m aware of, but Glover here is most definitely in the cantankerous mold of Redd Foxx and Madea.

Peter Dinklage plays the same role as he did in the original, a gay dwarf looking to blackmail the family, yet it feels less like a nudge-nudge punchline this time around. With most of the new cast actually being funny in and of themselves – in addition to all the aforementioned, we also get Loretta Devine as a bitchy matriarch, Keith David as a lazy preacher, and Kevin Hart as an incompetent mortician – there isn’t as much time devoted to rubbing the gay little person sight gag in your face, not to mention LaBute consciously plays against it by having every other character describe Dinklage as “the guy in the leather jacket,” as opposed to the more obvious traits. Ultimately, he was a better choice than Tony Cox would likely have been, not because of his skin color but because I can’t recall Cox ever playing subdued menace (or subdued ANYTHING) in the way that Dinklage can.

As for the idea of LaBute doing farce, well, it didn’t appeal to me either, as the closest he’s gotten before was THE WICKER MAN remake, and it’s not clear if that was deliberately comedic or not (star Nic Cage nowadays claims it was, for the record, but since he also probably thinks his hairpieces look good, you never know what to believe from him). Remember, though, that LaBute is trained in theater, and that much of the action in DEATH AT A FUNERAL is confined to one house, like a stage but bigger. He actually conveys a better sense of using the location than Oz ever did.

Chris Rock’s film career has been a spotty one, but he frequently makes interesting choices, even when they don’t pan out. In both DOWN TO EARTH and I THINK I LOVE MY WIFE, he went the remake route, and while neither was entirely artistically successful, they demonstrated a desire to stretch and explore cinematic conventions beyond the standard comedy template most SNL alumni tend to follow. With POOTIE TANG and HEAD OF STATE, he tried his hand at the more surreal style of humor he learned while collaborating with Louis C.K. – again, neither entirely successful, but both showing an itch to grow as an artist.

With DEATH AT A FUNERAL, he’s chosen wisely...source material that would seem to be a stretch, remade as something more familiar, testing his own acting limits by taking the straight-man role, while still allowing the material to be laden with crowd-pleasing humor. It may not be as big a risk as some of the others he’s taken, but it nonetheless appears to give everybody what they want.

 

Luke Y. Thompson is an actor, writer, and film critic living in Hollywood.