Sunday 18 April 2010

Cemetery Junction

I've followed and loved everything Ricky Gervais has done since the 11 O'Clock Show, so was prepared - despite the mildly disappointing The Invention of Lying - to be bowled over by Cemetery Junction, the film he co-wrote and directed with Stephen Merchant which went on general release on Friday. 

The film's story is derivative but enjoyable, involving a group of three lads in their early 20s growing up in a small town near Reading in the early 70s, struggling with boredom, the police, girls, the drudgery of work and the possibility of escape. Ricky Gervais plays the factory-worker father of the protagonist, Freddie, a clean-cut young man who is struggling to find his way, torn between his working-class background and his old childhood friends (with their self-destructive tendencies); his potentially lucrative but morally dubious and empty new job as an insurance salesman; and his desire to see the world. Meanwhile, he's developing a crush on a childhood sweetheart who is unfortunately engaged to his inattentive, sexist supervisor. 

What path will Freddie take? Finding out is a diverting experience which is bolstered by two sub-plots involving his geeky friend finding his first love while his other, cockier, mate learns a few harsh lessons about his past and his probable future. The jokes come largely at the expense of the former friend and are often, as you'd expect, laugh-out-loud funny (although the humour is both slightly too absurd for the context of an ostensibly realist film and not entirely new, being based on jokes that will be familiar at least to listeners to Gervais and Merchant's erstwhile Xfm radio show in the early 2000s).

Cemetery Junction is the sort of thing you'd be happy to take three generations of your family to see, as long as they weren't mortally offended by a couple of appearances of the word which the BBFC designates "very strong". One of those rare films where I was actually disappointed when the credits rolled because I would have liked to see more (it's only 95 minutes long, which is about right: the editing is tight yet the story is given room to breathe), it's not a masterpiece, and it dissipated from my mind almost as soon as I'd seen it - but if you're looking for an entertaining hour-and-a-half, you won't be disappointed.

No comments:

Post a Comment