Death at a Funeral

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Grade: B –

Director: Neil LaBute

Starring: Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Tracy Morgan, Regina Hall, Zoe Saldana, James Marsden, Luke Wilson, Danny Glover, and Peter Dinklage

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

For those wondering why there’s a remake of Death at a Funeral a scant three years after the original’s lackluster release, look no further than Neil LaBute. While the first film bore the novelty of a British comedy directed by an American – Frank Oz – and starring several American actors, the follow-up distinguishes itself in two principal ways. First is the African-American bent of a splintered, somewhat dysfunctional family brought together on the occasion of the passing of one of its patriarchs.

The other is LaBute, hardly a household name whose legacy as a director was cemented in the minds of movie critics and indie film fans by his audacious debuts, In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. His two-headed monument to modern-day misanthropy both conceded and laid bare a world of masculine survival of the fittest, where sadism and masochism thrive and the meek inherit nothing but personal and professional sorrow. They were depressing to watch only because they carried an uncomfortable, cynical truth. In the minds of many, they were brilliant.

Of course, even brilliant cynicism wears thin over time, for moviegoers, producers, and even the filmmaker himself. So, as LaBute has flailed about the last decade looking for different directions to point his talents, the quality of that work has precipitously dropped – Possession and The Wicker Man remake, for goodness sake?! Beginning in 2000 with Nurse Betty and resurfacing with Lakeview Terrace, LaBute has shown a recurring curiosity for the contemporary African-American experience, an interest he revives in Death at a Funeral.

On the day of his father’s funeral, Aaron (Chris Rock) finds himself at a personal crossroads. He is the older son who remained at home while his younger, more popular brother, Ryan (Martin Lawrence), made his way in the world as a somewhat successful author. Aaron and his wife, Michelle (Regina Hall), live in Aaron’s parents’ house under the mindful eye of his mother (Loretta Devine) and her blunt demand for a grandchild. The funeral also brings together an assortment of family and friends. There’s old Uncle Russell (Danny Glover), who basically eats, sleeps, and swears a lot (actually, everyone swears a lot; it’s a Neil LaBute film). There are family friends Norman (Tracy Morgan) and Derek (Luke Wilson), who still pines for Cousin Elaine (Zoe Saldana), who is now dating Oscar (James Marsden), much to the chagrin of Elaine’s dad (Ron Glass). And, then there’s a mysterious, diminutive stranger, Frank (Peter Dinklage, who starred in the British original), who reveals a furtive relationship with the dearly departed.

You get the picture, and so does LaBute, who gives lip service to a potpourri social dividing lines – racial, gender, age, class, sexual orientation, and familial strife. None of them are enough to give Death at a Funeral any particular import – it’s far too slapsticky for that. But, they strike enough familiar chords to conjure that edgy, discomfiting LaBute ethos.

The two most restrained actors are the ones you’d least expect, Rock and Lawrence. LaBute wisely leaves the hijinks to others, including Morgan, Glover, and especially Marsden, whose scene-stealing antics after Oscar unwittingly drops acid carry the movie until their 20-minute or so screen-life expires and begin testing the audience’s patience.

While the film is briskly paced at an efficient 90 minutes, its premise begins to wear thin by the last half-hour. And, LaBute too often goes the Farrelly brothers route by relying on the crutch of scatological snickers. Still, it’s an entertaining farce that works best when it thinks least. Death at a Funeral is anything but DOA, but it is hardly the long-awaited second-coming of Neil LaBute’s career.

Neil Morris

Lakeview Terrace

Time for Lasik and a diet

Grade: C –

Director: Neil LaBute

Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson, Kerry Washington, and Ron Glass

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

For fun, squint hard and trying seeing Lakeview Terrace as an examination of the disparate viewpoints on Obamamania. In one corner, we have the GOP bogeyman: an intelligent, upper-middle class African-American wielding authority. Across the ring is a lefty, Prius-driving, multi-culti archetype besieged by society’s prejudices and governmental intrusion into their private lives.

Trust me, that correlation not nearly as silly as this ugly, unpleasant thriller about a widowed LAPD cop, Abel Turner, (Samuel L. Jackson), who unleashes his anti-miscegenation demons onto an interracial couple – Chris (Patrick Wilson) and Lisa (Kerry Washington – who moves next-door. A devoted yet domineering dad, Abel demands his children use proper diction and sport a Shaq jersey instead of Kobe’s (presumably because of the race of their women). Never mind that Abel’s knuckle-dragging bigotry somehow exempts his extrageneous coworkers or other neighbors. Or, despite the offense to his puritan values when his kids witness the new neighbors canoodling in their pool, he still hosts a bachelor party littered with booze and strippers.

Chris courts Abel’s wrath by merely moving into his cul-de-sac, magnified by Abel’s annoyance at Chris’ penchant for rap music and his nasty habit of flicking cigarette butts onto Abel’s lawn. The standard neighbor-terror genre melds with a Training Day knockoff that grows more cartoonish by the minute, partly thanks to Jackson’s pauchy, menacing-stare slide into self-parody.

The true sin of Lakeview Terrace, directed by the filmmaker formerly known as Neil LaBute (a long, long way from In The Company of Men) is that it is neither insightful social commentary nor an entertaining, sensible thriller. Frankly, it plays more like a bastard vignette from Crash left on the cutting room floor because even Paul Haggis thought it was too heavy-handed.

There is a far more provocative, intelligent movie to be made out of Lisa’s affluent father (Ron Glass) and his disapproval of her choice of husband. Unfortunately, that subplot is subsumed by Abel’s increasingly irrational antics and LaBute’s half-hearted attempts to rationalize them. Through it all is the metaphor of an encroaching wildfire that, like this mistake of a movie, ultimately produces lots of smoke but few visible flames.

Neil Morris