Casket Case | Jay Baruchel and Rose Byrne live a cemetery lifestyle in Just Buried.
JUST BURIED
Directed by Chaz Thorne. Starring Jay Baruchel, Rose Byrne, Sergio Di Zio, Graham Greene. Opens Fri, July 25.
***
Oliver Whynacht is a loser. In his mid-20s, he’s a grocery-store delivery boy who’s so neurotic that he develops a nosebleed whenever he’s nervous. Which is all the time. And, to add insult to injury, his estranged father has just died and left him the family business—a nearly bankrupt funeral home in the town of Elders’ Bluff. A nice town to die in.
The pathetic but lovable Oliver (Jay Baruchel) isn’t alone in his plight; he arrives in Elders’ Bluff with his brother Jackie (Sergio Di Zio), who flirts like crazy and could have been a stud. One problem: he’s a priest. But once Oliver inherits and starts to fall for the beautiful mortician Roberta (Rose Byrne), things take a turn for the worse. A drunk driving accident provides Oliver with his first customer—and a secret to share with Roberta. Soon, the couple starts planning even more accidents in order to keep the funeral home open. In other words, they try to pull the business into the black by placing themselves deeper in the red, if you get my meaning.
Writer/director Chaz Thorne’s Just Buried is a darkly funny unromantic comedy about the things we do for love. This very Canadian movie is by turns funny, odd, and disquieting, even though it ultimately misses the mark. It’s more like a sitcom than a film—the characters and situations have that “politely wacky” feel of shows like Robson Arms and Corner Gas, and that’s a style that doesn’t hold the audience’s attention for the length of a feature film.
Baruchel is the real draw in Just Buried—you may recall him as the star of the short-lived Judd Apatow TV series Undeclared or the laughingstock of Clint Eastwood’s gym in Million Dollar Baby. As the quirky Oliver, he walks the thin line between endearingly hapless and annoyingly geeky, later transforming into a much darker, murderous nerd, with admirable skill. Byrne also gives a fine performance as the manipulative and startlingly practical Roberta. But these two are still stock characters, and all the charm in the world can’t make them seem fresh.
The supporting cast (led by the hysterical Graham Greene as the funeral home’s caretaker, accountant, and senior VP) fares better—perhaps it’s easier to forgive stock characters when they’re only on the margins of the story and the actors are having so much fun playing them. Thomas Gibson’s overly cheerful deputy and Nigel Bennett’ suspicious chief of police, as well as various cranky neighbours, provide a lot of amusing small-town atmosphere.
Just Buried is dark, but in a very harmless, very Canadian way that will remind you less of Fargo than of the low-key comedies that came out of Ealing Studios in the ’40s and ’50s. Older moviegoers uninterested in the likes of Pineapple Express may find it an intelligently written, appealingly underplayed alternative... or they could just as easily wait a few months for it to turn up on the CBC. It’ll look right at home.
