Alan Tudyk

Review: ’DEATH AT A FUNERAL’
A hilarious British farce from director Frank Oz
Grade: A-
Stars: Matthew MacFadyen, Rupert Grave, Keeley Hawes, Alan Tudyk, Daisy Costigan, Peter Dinklage
Writer(s): Dean Craig
Director: Frank Oz
Distributor: MGM
Release Date: August 17th, 2007

There are at any given time plenty of film comedies in theatres, and some of them are actually funny. Few, however, are laugh-consistently-until-water-squirts-from-your-eyes hilarious. What a pleasure to report that DEATH AT A FUNERAL is in this rare group. Directed by Frank Oz with a the glee and timing that reminds us in a good way of the magic he used to work with Muppets, Dean Craig’s script for DEATH is a brilliantly structured dark comedy with some heart that’s somewhere between an old Ealing farce, a Joe Orton play and something from the back of the place where nightmares meet the funny bone.

In the opening moments, put-upon Daniel (Matthew MacFadyen) received the coffin containing his late father’s earthly remains — only to notice the funeral home people have delivered the wrong body. This is just a taste of things to come. Matthew must contend with his grieving, ever-disapproving mother (Jane Asher), his girlfriend Jane who is worried, with evident cause, that Matthew may never move out of his parents’ home, the arrival of his successful and awesomely self-absorbed novelist brother Robert (Rupert Graves) and an infusion of family and guests for the service, to be performed in the parlor before Dad is interred.

Other significant visitors include Matthew’s cousin Martha (Daisy Costigan), who has given what she believes to be Valium to her gently nervous fiancé Simon (Alan Tudyk), a solicitor who dreads the scorn of Martha’s family. In fact, Martha has mistakenly given Simon a powerful hallucinogen, whipped up by her chemist brother Troy (Kris Marshall) from a wrongly-marked bottle that will be seen again ... and again. Matth’ew’s friends Howard (Andy Nyman) and Justin (Ewen Bremner) — who harbors a longing for Martha) — are charged with collecting ferocious and wheelchair-bound Uncle Alfie (Peter Vaughan). The minister (Thomas Wheatley) is in a hurry. Oh, yes, and there’s a stranger (Peter Dinklage) who says he urgently needs to speak with Daniel ...

Part of the fun here is when we can guess what’s coming, part of the fun is when we’re blindsided, and all of the fun is in seeing how Oz, Craig and the perfectly chosen cast sail through it as though it’s the most real ongoing situation ever. MacFadyen’s troubled, thoughtful demeanor is wonderful — we can see him puzzling over how all of these weird, unlikely things keep occurring in what he has until now supposed to be the rational world. Nyman’s grin, which just gets bigger and bigger as Howard copes less and less, is an asset of its own. Dinklage underplays a role that keeps taking turns to great effect. And enough cannot be said about Tudyk, whose commitment to every aspect of Simon’s delusional state is so intense and correctly pitched that eventually, simply seeing him move his head slightly is enough to get the whole audience going. Hawes and Costigan do heroic jobs of providing emotional anchors and keeping straight faces as the on-site representatives of comparative sanity.

The film’s look is modern cinematic Britcom — think perhaps FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL, et al — but the sight gags are pure wondrous lunacy, made all the funnier by Oz letting them go on naturally and remembering where they are, so that they continue in the background when something else takes precedence in the foreground (this sounds like common sense, but there are directors who will totally abandon one joke for another).

DEATH AT A FUNERAL is made with genuine, unpretentious craft and it will make you laugh, loud and hard, almost continually. It’s what comedies are meant to be.