May 17, 1996
Movies

DEATH BECOMES HIM

DAVID SCHWIMMER PUTS ASIDE HIS 'FRIENDS' FOR ONE TOO MANY
LOVERS IN 'THE PALLBEARER,' A BITTERSWEET--AND SUSPICIOUSLY
FAMILIAR--SLACKER COMEDY.


Review by Owen Gleiberman

Does any of this sound the least bit...familiar? Tom Thompson
(David Schwimmer) is a slack-jawed college graduate stuck in a
limbo of his own devising. An aspiring architect, he knows
he's supposed to be thinking about the future, but he can't
muster the will to segue into adulthood. He's stalled in a
hangover of postadolescent confusion. Then he runs into Julie
(Gwyneth Paltrow), the young woman he's had a crush on since
high school; suddenly, the world comes into focus. He knows
what he wants now--he wants her--and he'll do anything to get
her attention, even if it means making a spectacle of himself
at a civil ceremony (no, not a wedding, a funeral).
Unfortunately, there's another woman in the picture, a
temptress (Barbara Hershey) old enough to be his mother.
Desperate and devouring, she's more than available--she's
unavoidable--and Tom starts having an affair with her.
Overnight, the moonstruck romantic turns out to be a hormonal
hypocrite.

It doesn't take long to see that the folks who made THE
PALLBEARER (Miramax, PG-13), screenwriter Jason Katims and his
cowriter and director, Matt Reeves, have cribbed rather
shamelessly from The Graduate. What's more, they've done it
without devising any equivalent to the glib yet satisfying
sociocultural whimsy ("Plastics") that gave that movie its
zeitgeist cachet. The Pallbearer is The Graduate Lite, a
romantic-mix-up comedy that taps all too modestly into the
awkward emotional tribulations of being 25 years old. The
surprise is that it's also a sweetly funny and affecting
movie. David Schwimmer, in his first starring vehicle,
doesn't stray too far from his pleading-eyed, puppy-schlemiel
persona on Friends (though is it a coincidence that his voice
now has echoes of Dustin Hoffman's strangulated high tones?).
Schwimmer may or may not be a movie star, but by the end his
hangdog earnestness has acquired a touch of dignity.

Oddly, the one thing in The Pallbearer that doesn't work is
its ersatz-outrageous premise. Tom receives a phone call from
Barbara Hershey's Ruth, whose son has killed himself. She
thinks that Tom was his best friend, and Tom, who doesn't
even remember the fellow, is so bullied by her grief that he
agrees to be a pallbearer at the funeral. I didn't believe a
minute of this; more to the point, it's not funny (even the
payoff, Tom's delivery of a fumbling eulogy, fizzles badly).
Fortunately, it's only the first third of the film. What
begins as canned black comedy soon ripens into a bittersweet
valentine.

On Friends, the show about young urbanites who look like the
in crowd but act like the out crowd (they're an Aaron Spelling
wet dream gone geek), Schwimmer enjoys a crucial distinction:
He's the one cast member who actually seems to have thought of
the lines that come out of his mouth. There's a hint of
narcissistic coyness to his wise-guy-loser shtick, and that's
what The Pallbearer plays up: It uses him as a fellow who wears
his own insecurity as a mask.

Tom may be guileless, but when he wants something he's like a
dog who won't stop chewing the furniture. Out on a double date
with Julie, he doesn't know any of the old jazz standards his
friends are talking about, but he tries singing along anyway;
it's a hilarious moment--desperation turned to naked, scrambling
will. At the same time, when Schwimmer stares at Gwyneth Paltrow
(Seven), who has the most wholesome romantic presence of any of
the new young actresses, he's disarmingly tender, especially
when they bump heads during a fumbled kiss and he confesses, "I
should have told you I was goin' in." In The Pallbearer, David
Schwimmer doesn't make masculine longing look pathetic, like the
self-mythologizing idiots in Beautiful Girls. He turns his
schlumpiness into an ironic form of chivalry.

Julie likes Tom as much as he likes her, but there's a problem:
She plans to leave town. And so he allows himself to drift into
the arms of Ruth, his bleached-blond Mrs. Robinson. Hershey takes
this schematic role and soups it up into steamy, funny hysteria.
Inevitably, Tom's worlds collide, and though it's easy to see
what's coming--nothing that happens in The Pallbearer is very
surprising--the climactic confrontation merges comedy, pain, and
madcap embarrassment with satisfying finesse. Tom learns his
lesson, too: He drops the insecurity--the mask. By the end of The
Pallbearer, we're finally seeing David Schwimmer without his gawky-
boy mannerisms, and, for the first time, he looks like a real actor.


Grade:  B