Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		4.5

Death at a Funeral Blu-ray Movie Review

The First Death Was Funnier

Reviewed by Michael Reuben June 30, 2011

The more solemn the occasion, the better it is for farce. What deeper well of solemnity could one imagine than a funeral in a lugubrious English country home? Dean Craig's script for Death at a Funeral takes full advantage of the fact that mourners often assemble with powerful emotions barely held in check. Craig winds everyone's springs too tightly, then steps back while they all come undone.

Daniel (Matthew Macfadyen) greets the undertakers at the door of the house where he grew up and still lives, even now that he's married. The undertakers bear the coffin containing Daniel's father, whose earthly remains are returning to the house one last time for a funeral service. There's just one problem. When the undertakers open the coffin to show Daniel how beautifully his father has been prepared for burial, the body is someone else. The day goes downhill from there.

(I haven't revealed any more than the film's trailer. The real joke is the reaction of the undertakers.)

Now it's time to meet the principal mourners. There's Daniel's brother, Robert (Rupert Graves), for whom the term "sibling rivalry" is too mild. Robert is a successful novelist, who lives in America. His books are widely read, whereas Daniel cannot even bring himself to show anyone the first draft on which he's been toiling for years. Daniel has written a eulogy for their father, but everyone is disappointed that Robert isn't delivering one, since, after all, he's the writer in the family. To make matters worse, Robert is a spendthrift who announces that he's broke at the moment and can't pay his half of the funeral expenses. Meanwhile, Daniel's wife, Jane (Keeley Hawes, married to Macfadyen in real life), keeps pressing him to place a deposit on a flat so they can finally have a place of their own. And Daniel's mother (Jane Asher), newly widowed, positively blossoms when Robert enters the room.

Then there's cousin Martha (Daisy Donovan), daughter of the deceased's brother, Victor (Peter Egan). Martha is nervous, because her father hates her boyfriend, Simon (Alan Tudyk from Firefly and Dollhouse), who is accompanying her to the funeral. Simon himself is terrified of his girlfriend's father, so much so that when they stop to pick up Martha's brother, Troy (Kris Marshall), Martha gives Simon valium to calm his nerves. Except that it isn't valium. Unbeknownst to Martha, her brother, a student pharmacist, has been making extra money dealing designer drugs, and the bottle labeled "valium" contains a powerful hallucinogen. Simon's behavior is about to become very strange.

Martha has even more challenges ahead of her. An old flame, Justin (Ewen Bremner), has decided that her uncle's funeral is the perfect occasion to make a new play for Martha, and he's tagged along with a long-time family friend, Howard (Andy Nyman). It's only a minor inconvenience when Daniel phones Howard en route and diverts him to a retirement home to pick up wheelchair-bound Uncle Alfie (veteran English actor Peter Vaughan). Justin will spend the entire day sidling up to Martha like he's God's gift, oblivious to anything else that's happening (including the fact that Martha is trying to control her accidentally drugged boyfriend).

The most mysterious mourner is a diminutive figure whom no one recognizes (Peter Dinklage, currently on Game of Thrones). After everyone has gathered, he introduces himself to Daniel as "Peter", a friend of his late father, and proceeds to reveal an entire side of his father's life that Daniel never knew. Now, in addition to dealing with the escalating dramas around him, Daniel also has to confront a blackmailer.

Director Frank Oz, whose best work includes Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, What About Bob? and Bowfinger, keeps everything moving at a fast clip, pausing just long enough to convey essential information at the beginning and to let viewers catch their breath between laughs thereafter. Effective farce requires keeping an audience interested while you move all the players into position, and Oz assembled a skilled cast capable of distinguishing each character with a few broad strokes so that we quickly grasp who everyone is. Then it's on to the film's real business, where doors slam, decorum shatters, bodies fall, clothes come off, people get tied up, repulsive things happen in bathrooms, and Daniel never does get to deliver the eulogy he's so neatly written out on index cards.

So efficiently did Oz shepherd his actors through their paces that the final cut of the film came in under ninety minutes, which was too short to satisfy contractual obligations. Thus was born the mordantly witty title sequence, which shows an animated coffin traversing a roadmap to the funeral. It takes away nothing from the sequence's appeal to disclose that it's padding. It's very good padding, and the film that follows is even better.

Death at a Funeral Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Like most Blu-rays sourced from a digital intermediate, Death at a Funeral offers a clean, detailed image, presented in a 1080p, AVC-encoded transfer. Blacks are solid, detail is excellent throughout, and colors appear natural within a production design that's intended to showcase the English pastoral setting. (The green of the surrounding foliage is heavily featured for reasons that become evident as the film unfolds.) The precise and elaborate production design in such sets as Daniel's father's study can be seen in its minute particulars, as can the exteriors of the vintage country home that Alan Tudyk is required to scale in the buff when Simon's hallucinations carry him further and further aloft.

Death at a Funeral Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Director Oz took pains with the sound mix, but it's evident in his commentary that his focus was on the timing of sounds in relation to comedy beats, not on the viewer's immersion in a soundfield. The DTS lossless track for Death at a Funeral contains the occasional ambient noise, but the bulk of the film's audio remains in the front, where the characters are speaking and, increasingly, shouting to, at and over one another. The serviceable score by Murray Gold (composer for Doctor Who and Torchwood, among others) has been mixed so carefully that, when the film concludes, you may not even remember that it had music.

Death at a Funeral Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Fox continues to master MGM titles with no main menu but with BD-Java, omitting the ability to set bookmarks. No BDJ-encoded disc should ever lack this capability. BDJ prevents the user from stopping playback and starting from the same position, and bookmarking is the only workaround. Its omission is inexcusable. I will continue saying so until Fox changes its ways.

• Commentary with Director Frank Oz: "There's a lot of stories running around each other here", Oz says at one point. Much of his commentary focuses on the mechanics of keeping all those stories aloft and in play, which is the essence of farce. Above all, he credits his cast for their skill and invention, but he also stresses the importance of orchestrating just the right timing when a comedy depends on plot and build-up. (Oz says that he loves Airplane!, with it's non-stop punchlines, but that he wouldn't know how to make something like it.)



• Commentary with Writer Dean Craig and Actors Alan Tudyk and Andy Nyman: The screenwriter and the two performers joke with each other and reminisce about making the film. As with many such group commentaries, there isn't a great deal of information to be gleaned. Still, both Tudyk and Nyman are entertaining company, and they effectively convey the sense of making a movie as a job, where one has to show up, be prepared, and work hard at tasks that can be unusually demanding, especially if one is called upon, as Tudyk was, to spend four whole days performing stark naked in front of the entire cast and crew. (He found it unsettling when one of the older female cast members told him that his "bum" was much better looking than her son's.)



• Gag Reel (SD;1.85:1, non-enhanced; 7:46): In his commentary, Oz notes frequently how difficult it was for the actors to keep straight faces during takes. This gag reel confirms it.



• Theatrical Trailer (HD; 2:19): A well-cut trailer that accurately conveys a sense of the film while leaving plenty for the viewer to discover.

Death at a Funeral Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Neil LaBute's 2010 remake of Death at a Funeral, retelling the same story at an African-American funeral and starring Chris Rock and Martin Lawrence, was a capable effort and reasonably entertaining. But the original version stands alone, because no one equals the British in fearing embarrassment. (John Cleese gave a mini-lecture on this point in A Fish Called Wanda.) In the 2007 original, the comedy gets a booster shot from the energy that characters pour into maintaining a veneer of normalcy. As they lose it, one by one, you keep looking forward to the next one to fall. When the last one goes, it's a great moment. Highly recommended.