Review of Cemetery Junction (2010) by Michael G — 14 Jun 2010

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchantâ??s â??Cemetery Junctionâ?? is a warm, wry, lively comedy that accurately captures British lower-middle-class life in the Seventies in all its petty snobbery and unchecked bigotry. I found it a feelgood film partly because it made me appreciate the social progress thatâ??s been made in my lifetime. I moved in circles like the ones shown here back then. Unfortunately, I can confirm that black and gay people really were talked about like that, and a wife who wanted her career to be taken seriously really was liable to be seen as a scary â??womenâ??s libberâ??.

â??Cemetery Junctionâ?? manages to be genuinely funny while telling the tale of how four young people resist, in different ways, the expectations imposed by those traditional attitudes. The comedy is sometimes coarse, but thatâ??s apt enough for a story thatâ??s largely about a group of lads struggling to emerge from adolescence and determine their own identities, The main flaw is an unevenness of characterisation. Some of the people we meet in the eponymous Reading suburb are two-dimensional caricatures: the absurdly graceless would-be stud Snork (Jack Doolan). in particular, is simply too silly to be true. However, other characters seem to have wandered in from a more serious drama. Ralph Fiennes gives a chilling performance as Mr. Kendrick, self-made boss of the insurance company that recruits Freddie Taylor (Christian Cooke). Freddie initially sees a career in insurance sales as a route to a better life than that endured by his bigoted factory-worker Dad (Gervais). However, encounters with Kendrickâ??s daughter Julie (Felicity Jones) and his downtrodden wife â?? a fabulous portrayal of repressed rage by Emily Watson â?? soon suggest to him that this would be another trap just as soul-suffocating as the factory.

Julie is a talented photographer, and wants to turn professional. She likes Freddie, but sheâ??s engaged to Mike (Matthew Goode), Mr. Kendrickâ??s star salesman and protégé, and itâ??s plain that thereâ??s little room for wives with careers, or even personalities, in the patriarchal business world sheâ??s about to join. Meanwhile, thereâ??s another dysfunctional family unit thatâ??s apparently about to disintegrate, involving Freddie and Snorkâ??s friend Bruce Pearson (Tom Hughes). He's a stereotypical if stylish angry young man with a quick wit and a taste for trouble, whoâ??s disgusted with most things in Cemetery Junction but especially with his drunken Dad (Francis Magee). Bruce is in constant trouble with the local police, notably with one officer whoâ??ll look familiar to fans of â??Torchwoodâ?? â?? itâ??s Burn Gorman, once better known as Owen Harper, playing a more mundane kind of crime-fighter. Freddie, Bruce and Snork eventually plan to run away from all this together, and Freddie makes a late plea for Julie to join them. Will they make it?

â??Cemetery Junctionâ?? is generally darker than might be expected from Gervais and Merchant, but it explores some of the same territory as â??The Officeâ??, especially the routine humiliation that so often accompanies working life. Even if its characters sometimes seem shallow, the writing and acting is good enough to make you care what happens to them - and the glam-rock-laden soundtrack is a nostalgic treat for we Britons of a certain age. Iâ??m giving the film an extra half-star for using David Bowieâ??s version of â??All The Young Dudesâ??.