Funeral Day is a comedy drama about a neurotic young man who thinks he’s found a lump and might be dying, so he skips his friend’s funeral in an attempt to start living life to the fullest.
Cancer is never funny. Except in the movies when it is. Sometimes. Many filmmakers have taken to showing the humor behind the horror, showcasing the struggle of fighting with characters who face the impossible with courage and comedy, giving viewers a larger sense of humanity. Often, these stories travel a person along a journey of self-discovery, a redemptive path that allows for closure and even a little inspiration. With Jon Weinberg‘s latest Funeral Day, we meet such a person, sort of, who is on his own minor personal odyssey of possible death in this quirky, yet somewhat uneven, observation on a life in need of living.
Scott (Weinberg) is a classic neurotic, convinced everything about him is in disarray. One morning, after a typical sleepless night of self-doubt and doom-and-gloom, he believes the mole on his neck is melanoma and the lump on his testicle, cancer. That this morning is also the funeral day of a good friend, who died of cancer, might be his motivation for such thoughts. He’s young but feels he’s accomplished nothing and so, driven by a sudden urge to change his life, sets out to, well, change his life, deciding to skip the funeral and make it a day of redirection. With a fresh shave, a green suit, and an old pair of Converse, he runs (literally) out into LA and works to make things right.
Obviously, Scott’s a bit self-absorbed, and so, is not all that likable, obsessed with his need to find some kind of answer to his myriad questions. This has him trying to get back to a woman he basically left at the alter five years earlier, pick up a waitress at a diner, try to write a song in a friend’s studio, get suckered into home loan application, and more. He’s clearly out of sorts and blindly rushing into this mental checklist of must-do’s in order to find his true self. Naturally, he comes upon a number of oddballs as well, including a next door neighbor (Tyler Labine) who, after fondling said testicle, suggests a rather ribald trip to Thailand. There’s also a pair of pseudo-tantric healer kooks (Jed Rees and Kristin Carey) in the park who are quite touchy-feely.
All of this would seem full of comedic potential, and Weinberg absolutely sets these moments to be so, yet this is not a laugh out loud movie, as well it shouldn’t be. Weinberg appears to be more subdued with his approach, trying to layer Scott in absurdity, especially the more it trudges on, perhaps some of it meant to poke a little fun at life in LA, though not nearly to the acerbic levels it might be aiming for.
Scott is a weird guy, a chatterbox of neurosis, who never lets up on his casual Cassandra view of life. He runs everywhere, of which we see him do quite a lot, and in a sense, it might be said that Weinberg is drawing himself a kind of parable rather than something grounded in reality, Scott’s adventures throughout the day morality lessons in his mind rather than in the real world. The final image is certainly proof enough that maybe that’s one interpretation. Either way, the film is never quite so deep enough to make that significant, and while I applaud Weinberg’s efforts both in front of and behind the camera, this is simply a light bit of entertainment good for a night and not much more.