Death at a Funeral

Some American reviewers of Frank Oz's diverting farce treated it as if it were some class of art film. It truly is astonishing the bewitching effect a few English accents and the odd rose-covered cottage can still have in the New World, writes Donald Clarke.

DEATH AT A FUNERAL  ***

Directed by Frank Oz. Starring Matthew MacFadyen, Andy Nyman, Keeley Hawes, Daisy Donovan, Alan Tudyk, Peter Dinklage.15A cert, gen release, 90 min

As it happens, Death at a Funeralcomes across like a lengthy pilot for a middle-brow, mildly risqué BBC sitcom aimed at people who find The Vicar of Dibley too cosy, but are not quite up to the red meat of My Family. It's consistently amusing and occasionally somewhat dark, but nobody - or nobody east of Martha's Vineyard - is likely to confuse it with La Règle du Jeu.

Matthew MacFadyen, as sweetly uptight as ever, stars as a shy Hugh Grantalike, still resident in his mum's house, who is called upon to deliver the eulogy at his father's funeral. The first scene finds the undertakers delivering the wrong body, but this turns out to be the least vexing of an approaching abundance of comic misfortunes.

One guest (Alan Tudyk) accidentally ingests a strong hallucinogen. Another (Andy Nyman), a hypochondriac, has to deal with an incontinent older relative. Then a mysterious dwarf (Peter Dinklage, of course) turns up with an intriguing series of erotically themed photographs. He was the dead man's lover and he has blackmail in mind.

Farce is, famously, the cruellest of comic forms, and it thus rather helps the director's schemes that virtually everybody in the film is, for one reason or another, the sort of person you would happily see strangled in front of close family members. But the contrivance in the plot is all too intrusive - let's put this hallucinogen in this Valium bottle and wait for a neurotic to pass by - and, as a result, the comedy never achieves the hysterical transcendence of truly great farce such as Fawlty Towers. Still, after the criminal fiasco that was The Stepford Wives, Oz can consider himself back on the artistic straight and narrow.