Death at a Funeral (2007)

Frank Oz's Death at a Funeral arrives from 2007 wearing the expression of a man who has just realized he came to the wrong funeral. The plot is a machine for generating embarrassment: a misplaced hallucinogen, a toppled coffin, a naked man on the roof, a blackmailing stranger in the study. The ensemble is British and pressed into service like so many teacups at a garden party. Everyone behaves badly, and nobody learns anything, except that a eulogy can always be salvaged in the final minute.

The one element of social texture worth cataloguing is the late patriarch's male lover, Peter, played by Peter Dinklage, who arrives to extort the family out of fifteen thousand pounds. This supplies the film with a gay subplot of sorts, though it functions purely as farce, a secret played for mortification before an audience already weary of the joke in 2007. Dinklage's dwarfism is treated as incidental to the character, which is a quieter sort of progress. Beyond that, we have a closed white British world. No racial consciousness, no environmental concern, no body politics, no neurological vocabulary. The naked man on the roof exists for slapstick discomfort, not for self-acceptance.

Where the film might invite suspicion of sermonizing, it declines the invitation. The sibling friction over funeral expenses is petty grievance, not a treatise on wealth. The closing speech about family is warm, brief, and untroubled by ideology. This is a comedy of manners with no interest in reforming its audience. The absence of contemporary cultural signaling is not a failure of nerve. It is simply what the genre looked like at the time, and it plays as exactly that.