The road to the big screen for Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the creators of the original BBC version of “The Office,” hasn’t exactly been littered with roses so far. Gervais pulled his usual shtick in some half-baked cameos in the likes of “For Your Consideration,” “Night at the Museum” and “Stardust,” graduated to starring roles with the pleasant, but curiously joke-free “Ghost Town,” and made his directorial debut last year, alongside Matt Robinson, with “The Invention of Lying.” The latter’s a particularly interesting case — a very, very good script being totally and utterly botched in the execution, resulting in a nearly unwatchable final product. Merchant meanwhile, had cameos in “Hot Fuzz” and “Run, Fatboy, Run,” before taking on larger roles in the Dwayne Johnson vehicle “The Tooth Fairy” and the upcoming Farrelly Brothers comedy “Hall Pass.”
The pair have teamed up for the first time since “Extras” ended in 2007 for the comedy-drama “Cemetery Junction,” and it promised to be an interesting departure for them — a coming-of-age story focusing on small-town life in the 1970s, with Gervais taking, for the first time in their partnership, a smaller supporting role, putting a trio of newcomers in the spotlight.
Freddie (Christian Cooke), Bruce (Tom Hughes) and Snork (Jack Doolan) have grown up together in Cemetery Junction, a suburb of Reading, a town about 45 minutes from London. Now in their early 20s, Freddie has started to move away from his friends by taking a job for an insurance company, in the hope of emulating his new boss, the wealthy Mr. Kendrick (Ralph Fiennes). Bruce continues to work in a factory, and spends his evenings getting into fights, taking out his anger at his father’s failure to stop his mother from leaving, while Snork isn’t doing well with girls, ignoring the advances in the cafe at the station where he works.
Things are ticking along just fine, but when Freddie meets his boss’ daughter Julie, who happens to have been his childhood sweetheart, and the only person whose dreams extend beyond the boundaries of Reading, the possibility of escape becomes real for the first time. The problem is, she’s engaged to her father’s heir apparent, Mike Ramsay (Matthew Goode). It’s not exactly Charlie Kaufman in terms of originality of plot, then, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t connect with an audience; it’s a fairly timeless story, and it mines the same kind of nostalgia as “Diner” and “American Graffiti,” albeit shifted across the pond.
The most surprising thing about the film is that it’s not an out-and-out comedy; Gervais and Merchant have always mined a bittersweet tone in their work, and they’ve specifically named “The Apartment” as an inspiration for “Cemetery Junction,” along with films of the British New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s like “Billy Liar” or “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.” Anyone who turns up expecting three episodes of “The Office” strung together will be disappointed; the pair have different concerns on their mind. It’s not that it’s not funny — there are plenty of strong lines, but nothing that’ll be quoted by comedy fans for years to come.
The trouble is, without wall-to-wall gags, there isn’t a whole lot of a substance to the film. The characters are kicking against their dull hometown, the bleakness of their time period, and the low expectations that life has forced on them. And you know that because it’s reiterated, over and over again across the film’s fairly slight running time. Really, the theme’s much the same as in “The Office,” and the central romance is a virtual replay of the dynamic between Tim and Dawn in that series (and indeed, between Jim and Pam in the US remake), but whereas in those cases, it was able to unfold over hours and hours, here there’s a crushing lack of subtlety in the way the theme’s treated. The best example is with Ralph Fiennes and Emily Watson’s characters — two wonderful actors in parts well beneath them.
There’s a lovely, wordless moment where Watson hands Fiennes a cup of tea, and he doesn’t react to her existence at all — a great, economical way of portraying a one-sided marriage. The problem is that it’s immediately referred to in the dialogue. And explained. And explained again, and the characters are never really developed beyond that one moment; they’re given little to play except “patriarchal career man” and ‘”repressed housewife,” intended as a cautionary tale for the younger characters. The film ultimately feels like Gervais and Merchant handed over a first draft, and were immediately given the green light; maybe there’s a longer cut with more substance to it out there, but it doesn’t feel like it.
The performances are generally pretty good — again, Cooke’s part is a little undercooked, leading him to come off as a little bland, but he’s likable enough as an everyman. Hughes gets the meatiest material to work with — the relationship with his father is the most successful section of the film, and the actor manages to sell both that, and the swaggering hard man side of the character, while Doolan makes Snork genuinely lovable. Perhaps the best of the younger generation is Felicity Jones. Veering away from the pixie dream girl she could so easily have been, she becomes a living, breathing, complicated woman (although it’s not difficult to fall in love with her…), a dreamer who doesn’t quite have the confidence or the courage to follow them.
The supporting cast are generally very good (Matthew Goode and, in particular, “Extras” alumnus Steve Spiers are particular stand-outs), but the biggest casting misstep is with Gervais himself. Even with very little screen time as Freddie’s father, he’s deeply unconvincing — it doesn’t help that he’s clearly written the role for himself, and the character’s speech patterns are identical to his previous characters, and indeed to Gervais himself. It feels like watching David Brent in period clothing, the star once again getting a chance to throw political correctness to the wind, but this time it’s OK to be a bit racist, because it’s the 1970s, and Freddie’s rolling his eyes in the background.
Indeed, there’s not a great sense for the period, beyond the music, and even then it’s kept mostly to the hits. The language of the characters feels of the 21st century, rather than of the time, and there’s too many jokes made in hindsight; the film opens with not one, but two I-can’t-believe-people-didn’t-realize-Elton-John-was-gay gags, for instance. We’d also be remiss if we didn’t mention the score — by former Des’ree collaborator Tim Atack — is one of the worst we’ve heard in some time, intrusive and, again, a little anachronistic.
Away from TV, the pair’s directing skills, while an improvement on Gervais’ effort on “The Invention of Lying,” aren’t quite up to scratch either — the framing’s mostly a little vanilla, and the editing botches a few of the jokes, as well other key moments; a scene around a table at a party mid-way through the film is an object lesson of how not to shoot and cut a scene with multiple characters. Having said all that, the tone’s so light and genial that it’s a hard film to truly dislike, and it’s certainly a vast step in the right direction compared to “The Invention of Lying.” But if the pair are truly serious about film, they need to let go of their past work, and push even further into new pastures. “Cemetery Junction” is now on release in the U.K., and will roll out in the rest of the world later in the year. However, there is no U.S. distributor for the film at this time. [C]