Reviewed by PETER CALDER
(Herald rating: * * *)
This unassuming comedy is plainly targeted at the US (where it will be entitled Undertaking Betty) since an opening title describes Wales as a small country "to the left of England" and features Naomi Watts, scantily clad in a small role.
Whether its particular
brand of broad and innocent British farce in the tradition of Arsenic and Old Lace will cross the Atlantic is hard to predict but it will go down well here with the crowd that made Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War such a runaway success. Any film that features a dancing undertaker and a street race between two hearses, one of which is a stretch limo, clearly has its tongue in its cheek.
Boris Plotz (Molina) is the middle-aged mortician in a small Welsh village who has loved Betty Rhys-Jones (Blethyn) from afar since their childhood. His chance to declare himself comes when Betty's bedridden and shrewish mother-in-law snuffs it. Betty's town-councillor husband (Pugh) is bonking his secretary (Watts) but the good-hearted Betty won't expose and divorce him. Instead Boris and Betty settle on an approach to elopement which involves the undertaker's specialist skill.
Adding to the plot's complications is rival undertaker Frank Featherbed (Walken) and his fungus-toothed offsider (stand-up comic Evans) who want to drive Boris out of business with two-for-one deals and themed funerals.
Director Hurran has worked mainly in television (though he did direct Blethyn and Julie Walters in the 1999 film Girls Night) and Plots has a small-screen feel which makes it both comfortably accessible and strangely cramped.
The film is full of ideas - Miriam Margolyes as identical twin shopkeepers is an example - which are unsustained by a script with a grasshopper mind but the plot has enough semi-slapstick action in the last 20 minutes to drag even the most reluctant viewer through. Fun.
Cast: Alfred Molina, Brenda Blethyn, Christopher Walken, Lee Evans, Robert Pugh, Naomi Watts
Director: Nick Hurran
Running time: 95 mins
Rating: M (sexual scenes)
Screening: Bridgeway, Rialto
