Mellotron Sounds

There’s this scene in The Office: the one where Gervais’ character gets fired immediately before he’s about to go outside for a charity photo shoot on Red Nose Day, a comic-relief fundraiser. From the waist down he’s dressed like an ostrich, with fake pant legs hanging from his belt and over the bird’s back as if he were riding it. Outside, a photographer is telling him to be funny, to frolick around and peck his fake ostrich head on the oversized check that his co-workers are holding. It’s grey and about to rain. No one’s smiling. And Gervais, from the waist down, is dressed like some puppet off Sesame Street; the waist up he’s beaten and impatient, going through the motions and trying not to cry. It’s one of the saddest and most complicated moments of comedy I’ve ever seen. It’s the show in a nutshell, the essence of everything it set out to do. And its what, maybe single-handedly, kickstarted my man-crush-like love affair with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

Stephen Merchant, now there’s a guy that’s got to be pretty used to getting screwed over in the credit department. He was right there with Gervais when they started their radio show, the one that lead to The Office, which they wrote and directed together. And he was the other guy behind Extras, Gervais second series, co-writing and directing again, as well as co-starring. But Gervais is the face of their comedy. He’s the guy the camera follows, and Merchant doesn’t seem to mind all that much Gervais’ name always being the one associated with words like “genius.” All for the greater good, I guess.

Still, The Office wouldn’t have been The Office without Merchant and Gervais probably not Gervais. It’s a whole Abbott/Costello, Lennon/McCartney thing. Chicken and the egg. Mutual, likewise, reciprocated.

Gervais went off and did his own thing for a while, though, after Extras–first Ghost Town last year, then writing and directing his first feature, The Invention of Lying, with some new guy named Matt Robinson (“…The Greatest Movie Ever Made”), which is set for September. How good that’ll be remains to be seen but this–This–is the next Gervais project everyone’s been waiting for: It’s his first film written and directed with Stephen Merchant, it’s a period piece, set in ’70s England, a comedy, and it’s called Cemetery Junction.

Originally titled The Man from the Pru, Cemetery Junction “tells the funny, touching and universal story of being trapped in a small town and dreaming of escape.”

Sound similar to The Office? Yeah, definitely. But that’s what so appealing about it to me. Not because I’m hoping for some kind of longer, big screen copy of the show. But because of Gervais and Merchant’s more intellectual leanings, the dramatic and realist sensibility that plague (which I say in the absolute best way possible) all of their prior work, and how it might lend itself to film, possibly expand and centralize.

And this kind of stuff really is my favorite, dramas that hide inside the skin of comedy, stuff from guys like Woody Allen or Alan Ball that use laughs to segue into something deeper. And its a style Gervais and Merchant are no stranger to. This idea of being “trapped,” it’s in all of their work the same that death and existential crisis is in all of Woody’s.

Just look at the cast they put together for this thing, people like Emily Watson from Synecdoche, NY and Breaking the Waves, and Ralph Fiennes from Schindler’s List and The Reader. Okay, these aren’t strictly art house actors, and granted they’re not the “stars” of the movie, newcomers are. But heavyweights like these have to suggest something more profound. The fact that Gervais and Merchant are taking a bit of a backseat screentime-wise, also; the way Gervais, a comedian, declared This is England, a gritty and relentless British drama about being trapped and lost and struggling, one of his favorite films a few years back … come premiere day, I’d really be surprised if I wasn’t surprised but just how much more the underlying themes weigh in than the laughs.

And plus, Gervais and Merchant have to know what’s “expected” from them, and who doesn’t love spitting in the face of that? I’m envisioning Cemetery Junction to be a comedy the same way something like Fiennes’ In Bruges or especially Watson’s Punch-Drunk Love is a comedy–which is to say, it almost kind of isn’t.

Cemetery Junction is scheduled for a 2010 release. Watch the hilarious promo video, which may or may not completely invalidate my “deep and affecting” theory, after the jump.

When I first saw it, I immediately thought about Spencer and Sadiq and how much I knew they’d laugh if we’d seen it together. It’s weird, getting older, moving away from people, movies and music become something else entirely than what they were when I was 13, listening to whatever I heard on the radio or could find in my dad’s muzak collection. Now, they’ve become some kind of connector, the two cans with the string in the middle that transfers vibrations from one side to the other. Except nowadays the string is long, running down highways and caught inside of trees, vibrating hard like plucked bass about this week’s episode of True Blood or the horror I watched last week that my friends just have to see. Sometimes the sound gets muffled or slurred, but you can always feel a pulse in your fingers. That’s how you know you’re still connected.

Here’s the rest of Cemetery Junction’s official synopsis:

“In 1970s England, three blue-collar friends spend their days joking, drinking, fighting and chasing girls. Freddie (Christian Cooke) wants to leave their working-class world but cool, charismatic Bruce (Tom Hughes) and lovable loser Snork (Jack Doolan) are happy with life the way it is. When Freddie gets a new job as a door-to-door salesman and bumps into his old school sweetheart Julie (Felicity Jones), the gang are forced to make choices that will change their lives for ever.”