Death At A Funeral proved comedies set at burials aren’t funny it proved that twice and now we have further proof. Even if you’re in the mood for a schmaltzy family feelgood comedy this will stretch your patience to the limit. A hugely appealing and charming cast are completely wasted in Levy’s comedy,’ which uses just about every tame gag going and has a curiously dated feel to it.
Jason Bateman is the everyman who finds his wife cheating on his boss, then learns his dad has died. Mum (Jane Fonda) insists that all four of her children come home for seven days of shiva’ (dad was a non-believing Jew), and they have to sit together and thrash out all of their old issues.
Bateman is such a coward he hasn’t told mum he is divorced, while she is happy to drone on about how sexually adventurous her husband was and display her enormous new boobs. Tina Fey is the daughter who wants everything to be thrashed out (ooh, missus), and then there are the warring brothers, Adam Driver, a screw-up who has bagged a rich milf and got his hands on loads of cash and a Porsche, and Corey Stoll, the ambitious’ one who is trying to have a baby with his nervous wreck of a wife.
They are all surprise surprise in therapy, and think it’s fine to drag up old stories and arguments, apart from Bateman who finds the whole charade nauseating. However he does have the chance of something with Rose Byrne, the old school pal who never left their little town and now runs the ice rink, meaning she can practice her routines every day. She too is on meds, which give her a hilarious’ form of Tourette’s, blurting out whatever nonsense is in her head at the time. Kooky is what she is going for.
There are several problems here, mainly the paper-thin script and jokes that simply aren’t funny. Fonda’s revelations about her sex life to her cringing children just feels dull rather than shocking, and the boob job joke wears out pretty quickly. Worse there are the staples of this kind of feelgood comedy, such as the idiot savant opposite who Fey might fall for. The implication is that his brain injury has made him a better person so why don’t we all go around having car accidents?
The performances suit the material, in that they all seem half-hearted. Bateman and Fey, who have enormous appeal, seem to give up halfway through, Fey in particular just looks vaguely bored with the whole thing. There are lots of stuff about dysfunctional families at one point Fey says of her brothers “they are idiots but they are my idiots but it all feels so stale. Fonda meanwhile, still gorgeous, proves she doesn’t have a funny bone in her body.
There’s a line in David Mamet’s play Speed-The-Plow where a film producer shouts, “People just want to see the same film they saw last year. No-one wanted to see a funeral comedy last year, and no-one wants to see one now. An absolute shambles that should have been buried at script stage, excuse the pun.
Overall verdict: Charmless, unfunny, poor comedy that hits none of its targets and wastes all of its acting talent. One of the year’s worst.
Reviewer: Mike Martin