Cemetery Junction
Dripping with nostalgia, Cemetery Junction centres on three working class lads in their early twenties who want to break free from their small hometown in search of more exciting lives.

The Office in feature-length form this ain’t, and strangely, it seems nobody has expected Cemetery Junction to be either. It is a testament to writers and directors Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s skill for crafting stories and characters that we expect more from them than to simply retread old ground. Top marks to the twosome, then, for not succumbing to writing any old comedy film, but as a drama their first foray into cinema feels a little too traditional for their considerable talents.

The film is set in 1970s Reading and seems to take place over the course of one those long, hazy summers that seemingly lasted forever in our youth. Dripping with nostalgia, the story centres on three working class lads in their early twenties who want to break free from their small hometown in search of more exciting lives. This is easier said than done however, and as the film progresses it’s clear that the three lads have considerable affection for their hometown. So far, so Bruce Springsteen (of whom Gervais and Merchant are both big fans), but the film manages to remain distinctly British in personality throughout.

The film may well make a star of the charismatic Tom Hughes, who plays Bruce – an angry young factory worker who lives with but despises his father. Hughes exudes cool and has an impressive on-screen presence that belies his age and relative inexperience as an actor. The role and the 1970’s jeans-and-leather-jacket-combo suit Hughes well too, and it’s hard to imagine him fading into obscurity. Bruce likes fighting quite a lot, though, and for all his talk of leaving the town he always seems least likely of the three friends to actually do it. Having said that, Snork (Jack Doolan) – the fat, socially-inept clown of the threesome – doesn’t seem too likely to make it out either.

Out of the three, Freddie Taylor (Christian Cooke) is the only one making the real effort to leave. He gets a job as a door-to-door life insurance salesman to get out of the factory his father works in. In doing so, however, Freddie quickly becomes disillusioned with his line of work and the life mapped out for him. He also manages to fall for the boss’s daughter, Julie (Felicity Jones), who is unfortunately already engaged to unappreciative careerist and fellow salesman Mike. Cooke is affable enough as Freddie, but he struggles to add much more to what is, in all honesty, a rather one-dimensional and well-worn character: a young, good looking and well-meaning hero (in many ways the antithesis of Ricky Gervais, whose upbringing the film is loosely based upon). The change Freddie undergoes from wishing to settle down and marry at the start of the film, to wanting to travel and see the world, seems far too swift and inadequately explored. Freddie at one point also fears he may lose his job for lack of sales, but for reasons that are never explained, he manages to hold on to it. Gervais and Merchant may have set out to make a heart-warming drama, but this lack of detail coupled with some of the simplistic characters and dialogue means Cemetery Junction lacks emotional depth.

With Gervais and Merchant, we expect not only to laugh, but also care about the characters and to be touched. The Office made you laugh, but as shown by the Tim and Dawn saga, it could also make you cry. Unfortunately, though, it is tough to drum up the same enthusiasm for the characters in Cemetery Junction. The story needs to demonstrate early on that Bruce, Freddie and Snork are a group of lads with a close friendship, and so Bruce kindly obliges by decking a punter in the local pub for calling Snork a “retard”. This rather ham-fisted approach works fine in a straightforward comedy, but in a drama greater subtlety is needed to explore the relationship between characters. Both The Office and Extras knew this, so why doesn’t Cemetery Junction?

It’s easy to forget, though, that this is Gervais and Merchant’s first attempt at writing and directing cinema. To all intents and purposes, Cemetery Junction is a reasonably successful, light-hearted drama that will likely be fairly well-received by audiences, if quickly forgotten. After being blessed with their consistently excellent comedy work over the past decade, perhaps it’s a little unfair to expect the same level of quality from Gervais and Merchant, but one can’t help leaving the film with a mild feeling of disappointment.

You certainly get a great sense of Gervais and Merchant’s love for the era, and this is obviously the kind of film they felt compelled to make. It just feels that on this occasion the film they needed to make isn’t the kind of film anyone else needed them to make – the world already has a Richard Curtis. And while Curtis may not be half as funny as Gervais and Merchant, few are better at British, feel-good nostalgia – The Boat That Rocked being a prime example.

There are times when the directors’ personalities do turn up in Cemetery Junction. They have produced some decent comedy scenes here, though while you would rarely accuse a man who regularly and openly mocks his own weight of being arrogant and egotistical, it does seem as if Gervais has saved the funniest dialogue for the few scenes that he himself appears in. Sat at the breakfast table, Freddie’s dad (played by Gervais) dishes out some quintessential Gervais-Merchant quick-fire humour in a discussion with Freddie’s Gran involving starving Ethiopians and cats’ anuses. Ultimately, it is these scenes that are the most successful at distinguishing the film from what is an otherwise romanticised, Curtis-like portrait of 1970s working class Berkshire, but there aren’t nearly enough of them.

A better and more interesting film could have been made out of the ideas here – the undercurrent of 1970s racism could have been explored further for instance – but at least if Gervais and Merchant are simply doing exactly as they please, one would hope that future efforts from the twosome will improve as they gain in confidence. Perhaps they will in the future prove themselves to be worthy writers of drama, as they have of comedy, but they have some way to go yet.