AfterEllen.com - Review of Eulogy

Director Michael Clancy’s Eulogy (2004), released this month on DVD, features an all-star cast playing members of a disfunctional family hiding decades of buried secrets--and more than one lesbian relationship.

The cantankerous bunch reunites in suburban Rhode Island when their patriarch (Rip Torn) dies, and the family freak show promptly begins. Besides Torn, the cast includes Zooey Deschanel, Ray Romano, Hank Azaria, Piper Laurie, Gleanne Headly, Jesse Bradford and Debra Winger, who was coaxed out of retirement for her standout performance in a role that pinches the bulk of the screenplay’s zingers.

It also includes Kelly Preston (Jerry Maguire, Sky High) as lesbian daughter Lucy, who uses the occasion of her father’s death to come out to the gathered relatives and announce her engagement to girlfriend Judy, played by Famke Janssen (X-Men, Nip/Tuck).

Granddaughter Kate (Deschanel) is charged with writing the eulogy but no one in the family manages to come up with anything nice they can say about their seldom seen traveling salesman father. Lucy (Preston) remembers with more nonchalance than puzzlement that he sometimes used to get her name wrong (which turns out to be a significant detail), but everything else that stands out about the barely eulogizable man is far from tributary. As the funeral approaches, Kate’s undertaking rouses much bitter banter as well as a slew of exhumed secrets and memories.

The deceased’s granddaughter’s increasingly challenging assignment is at the center of this farce, but another running joke is the bereaved wife’s (Laurie) repeated and increasingly outlandish suicide attempts. In addition to being the Collins matriarch’s nurse, Glenne Headly plays a long-lost high school friend of Alice’s (Winger)--and their reunion turns into more of a rekindling.

Meanwhile, back from her freshman year at college, Kate reprises her own awkward friendship and one-time romance with high school friend Ryan (Bradford). Kate’s father (Azaria) is an actor whose most glorious credit was starring in a popular peanut butter commercial as a child and who now earns a living in porn, apparently unbeknownst to his family.

And Kate’s uncle Skip (a mustachioed Romano), who seems more like a used car salesman than the contemptuous lawyer he proves to be, arrives with his disturbingly pranksterish twin sons, who have driven their mother away with stunts like destroying the birthday cake she has lovingly labored over and demanding the “erotic cheesecake” they insist they “ordered.”