Death at a Funeral (2010)

Neil LaBute's 2010 remake of Dean Craig's own 2007 British farce relocates the Barnes family from the English home counties to an African-American household, and that shift is the most consequential decision in the picture. Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Tracy Morgan, Regina Hall, Danny Glover and Loretta Devine fill out an ensemble the original had staffed with pale Britons, and the film treats the change as unremarkable, which is to say it never pauses to explain itself. The result is a comedy that looks different from its source without ever announcing that it does. A rare instance of representation arriving without a press release attached.

The plot's engine is a dead man's secret. Frank Lovett, played by Peter Dinklage in the only role carried over from the earlier version, arrives at the service with photographs and a demand for thirty thousand dollars, having been the deceased's lover for years. The revelation is central, unavoidable, and handled entirely as farce: blackmail, a wrestling match, a dose of hallucinogens, a man stuffed into a coffin. Here is a mainstream studio comedy in which a gay relationship drives the entire narrative, and nobody delivers a speech about tolerance. Whether that constitutes progress or merely good plotting is a question the film declines to entertain.

The picture's omissions are instructive. It offers no thesis on race, no critique of money, no sermon on how we ought to live. Female characters marry, worry, and get pregnant, and the screenplay asks nothing more of them. What it sets out to do is make an audience laugh at a corpse, a naked man on a roof, and a father's double life. It succeeds often enough. Ebert preferred it to the original, a minority position, and the aggregate scores sit stubbornly in the middle. A farce, competently assembled, with no ambitions beyond the next punchline.