British Farce is Back

Review: Death at a Funeral - Script by Dean Craig

The second full-length script from Dean Craig, Death at a Funeral seeks to mark its place as another quirky English farce. There is no mistaking the Englishness of this concept; sordid affairs, accidental drug taking and gross toilet escapades at a funeral characterise this film as specifically British in humour. No other country would seek to treat such a sombre occasion with such disrespect.

And isn't that just wonderful.

Of course, the setting and the ensuing events are all about provoking shock value. It is the obvious device of contrasting the solemnity with the ridiculous that is the bedrock of so much British comedy, challenging taboos and stretching limits of taste in a humour tradition that seeks to force the audience to reassess those social conventions that regulate our lives.

Fast Moving Farce

The secret to a strong farce is in pace. The twists and developments should throw themselves at the audience so quickly and unrelentingly that we become dizzied with complexities of the plot. Each development should be succeeded by an even more shocking development before the audience has had time to recover, spring-boarding off each other until we are weary with laughter and exhausted with tension.

Death at a Funeral manages this incident on incident on incident rollercoaster exceptionally well in the second half, never allowing the audience to catch its cumulative breath before unleashing some horrendous new twist on the unfortunate characters. But the problem with the film lies in the first half, as, in setting up all the various threads that would trigger each incident, the script ambles through an overlong first act.

First Act Problems

For me, the first act often seems the most problematic for so many scripts. Many scripts start with a clear idea of how the climax will unfold and what will lead us to that climax throughout the second act, but the first act must set things in motion whilst hinting to the audience what they should expect. It is no surprise that the first half hour of a movie is the most crucial in keeping a viewer away from the remote control or from the cinema door. Death at a Funeral fails in signposting the sheer lunacy that would come later by instead focusing on character setup and a roll-out of subplot after subplot, even before the main inciting incident has occurred.

This inciting incident, of the mysterious midget guest and his sordid secret, seems to have been relegated to the position of Act 2 turning point instead of Act 1 climax, focusing the audience's expectations on the wrong plot areas. Act 1 seems to suggest that the hallucinating brother in law is the driving force of events, when, quite soon into Act 2, he is relegated to a subplot hiding in a bathroom. It is as if the writer couldn't think what to do with him after he had served his purpose, as this subplot scarcely intersects with the main storyline again.
 

But this strange first half structure does not detract from a second half that ranks as one of the most outrageous film experiences in recent months. Fast, satisfying and most definitely hilarious, Death at a Funeral achieves its goal. But I can't help feeling that a restructuring of the first half could have turned a strong comedy into an uncompromising classic.