May 4, 2016I really wanted to like this picture since it's clearly inspired by the 1967 film "The Graduate." I like David Schwimmer but I didn't like "The Pallbearer." It's because the film is a heartache of characters that seem to be thrown into the film for no reason and it's too stupid to watch as the plot unfolds, we are left with nothing. It starts off promising but falls off the wheels very fast.It's about a 25-year-old bachelor, Tom Thomson (David Schwimmer), who lives at home with his mom, Ruth Abernathy (Carol Kane) and sleeps in a bunk bed. One day, he receives a phone call from, Ruth Abernathy (Barbara Hersey) who is the mother of a kid that Tom went to school with. The kid, Bill has committed suicide so she wants Tom to be a Pallbearer and give a eulogy at the funeral. Tom easily screws up the eulogy and struggles to remember who Bill was in high school. Tom's high school crush, Julie DeMarco (Gwyneth Paltrow) re-enters his life and sends Tom worlds on a crash course for destruction when Ruth becomes attached to Tom and he must figure out who Bill is and keep Ruth off his back while chasing after Julie.There were so many questions I had to ask myself during this picture and one of them was "Why does this film exist and what does it try to accomplish?" In answer, not a whole lot. There are multiple characters in this picture that don't work and they cause the plot to unfold in stupid ways. Julie re-enters Tom's life because the screenplay just told her to show up. Barbara Hersey plays a vixen who wants to sleep with Tom for some reason even though her son just killed himself. Carol Kane is wasted as Tom's mother and Michael Rapaport is wasted as, what I think is, Tom's friend. There's another friend in there as well. They act as though they are brothers but we never learn this.Anyway, it opens promising with the character of Tom being an insecure and sluggish kind of person who looks like he has no clue what he is doing in life or with himself. He's never dated a woman, his only companion is her mother and he doesn't seem to know what to do in any situation. When he receives the call for the pallbearer task, he doesn't remember who Bill is. We don't learn who Bill was or why he died. We only learn Tom's name was in a will, supposedly. From here we start to question where this picture is going to go. Tom shows up at the funeral and makes an idiot out of himself because he can't tell Ruth that he doesn't remember her son. Soon after, the plot goes downhill and the film falls right off the tracks.Ruth becomes infatuated with Tom and we never understand why. He ends up sleeping with her while attempting to fetch Julie in his own stupid way and the film because a love triangle of sorts that really spins out of control. Of course, Julie finds out and Tom is in hot water. This concept is stretched over the course of an hour and never really develops. We never learn what Ruth's agenda is or who she is. Maybe she ruins people's lives for fun or maybe she is a lonely woman? We don't know and that's the biggest problem this picture faces with any of the characters. It gets tiring very fast.Julie's character is wasted as well. We learn nothing about her and she seems to act like she never went to high school with Tom either until she confesses "I remember you." Why does she tell him this 45 minutes into the picture? She is not developed either and the ending proves that she was a waste all along as well. I'm sure what the message they were trying to send out here but the film is all over the place and never stop to explain anything. She's a romantic prop that shows up in a few scenes and then disappears like she was never there in the first place. Her character is the one that was the hardest to figure out and by the second act, I just didn't care anymore.I was quite disappointed when he ending came and I was saying to myself "Maybe they will explain this mess at the end?" and No, no, they didn't. The film attempts to end on a positive note which it does work. It's semi-conclusive but it doesn't explain the rest of the story and why everything happened and leaves us feeling very tired and exhausted from trying to figure this mess out. Matt Reeves and Jason Katims wrote this and that would explain at least one thing. Jason is a TV writer and I think this picture would have worked better if it were made as a TV series to explore everything it set out to tell. However, as a movie, its fails.

No One really needs another review of this but i'll try.The Pallbearer sustains a beautifully melancholic tone throughout its running time. Those of you who've sat through countless indie films will realize how incredibly hard this is to do in practice. You push this tone too much, you run the risk of looking overly self indulgent or pompous...The Pallbearer doesn't look either of these---it manages to effectively convey the main character's sad existence, the lack of dreams he has for himself, as well as the realization that he's going to need some if he ever wants to get out of his mom's house in Brooklyn.That it manages to set this up while pursuing an unrequited love plot line----schwimmer meets up with his long term high school crush at a social function and resumes pining for her (and yes this was Gwenyth Paltrow's first major role at the time i believe)--while slowly realizing that he could actually date her if he wanted to--which he then attempts to and slowly but surely fumbles away. Its his fumbling that actually makes this plot line work--because his character has such lack of confidence in his abilities to do anything successfully you can almost see how he's just completely sabotaging this relationship up almost as a default setting.The plot borrows a strong ingredient from The Graduate--In short order Schwimmer's character ends up bedding a much older woman---and a much more dominant one as well--but i think his relationship with her comes from a different place then Dustin Hoffman's reasons for bedding Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Schwimmer's character feels like a loser, so he acts like a loser, so he continues to live like a loser--perpetuating the cycle--its not exactly an act of rebellion or an act of concern about his future the way it was for Hoffman---but still its a key plot point of The Graduate and the two films similarities in plot and tone are hard to overlook---and yet The Pallbearer got to me in a way that The Graduate never did. Maybe its because The Pallbearer is more contemporary (although not too contemporary--if it was done today--schwimmer's character would spend all of his time on message boards on the internet for sure.) but i definitely felt this film strike a nerve deep within me far more painfully then The Graduate did.This film also was the first one produced by none other then JJ Abrams--2 years before Felicity made its debut on TV--and a full 8 years before LOST premiered. It was also written by frequent TV writer Jason Katims (he of Friday Night Lights, Boston Public, Roswell, and various other rather uncommonly well written television shows concerning modern wayward youth) and directed by Matt Reeves who went on to direct Cloverfield and Let Me In (which is odd because the only horror this film has is completely in the abstract societal sense.) Either way--there was a lot of major talent involved behind the making of this film that was just starting out here for the first time--and i truly believe it to be a far more noteworthy film not only because of that but also because this movie was completely ahead of its time in showing you the whole twenty somethings who don't know what to do with their life stage of life---and also a truly underrated film on its own merits worthy of study and a true successor to The Graduate (and the fact that it'll prob never be seen as such largely sucks.)

... You can't exactly shove her out of the way, because she's old; and if you were being charitable you might say that the ponderous gait she ambles along with isn't really her fault. Nevertheless, in these circumstances it's often difficult not to become irritated when you find yourself dragging your heels in her wake. So it is with "The Pallbearer", an attempt to do something 'different' with a romantic comedy that in this way is chiefly hamstrung because the venue is all wrong; sort of like showing off your 'breakdancing' skills at a grandparent's funeral.To further extend the metaphor (perhaps unwisely!); like the old lady, one starts to feel with the set-up of the film that its demise cannot be far away. Sure enough, this particular 'death' is agonizingly protracted, slowly chipping away at our reserves of empathy in tiny little increments, as depressingly we come to the realisation that the proceedings are only headed in one direction: Downhill. Its laboured attempts at 'humour' can be seen coming a mile off - again, not unlike the grim inevitability of death!Returning once again to the image of 'dragging heels', the main character, Tom, is shown to ceaselessly repeat this action throughout his life. If there are indeed degrees of 'pathetic', then this sap is possibly a good few notches ahead of Schwimmer's other - more famous - role. To find oneself in the awkward position of having to align audience sympathies with a character even MORE 'clueless' than Ross is certainly a tough ask even for as 'able' a comic performer as Schwimmer, but I guess he can find fault with himself for signing on to some seriously 'echoing' situations in the first place.How will he ever escape his most famous portrayal if he's picking scripts where the characters could almost be 'interchangeable', even if the situations aren't? A man with a longstanding high-school crush on someone he hasn't seen for years. Sound familiar... ? Paltrow is nothing else if not bland in her 'Rachel' role, but all of this going over old ground would perhaps be forgivable if the noticeable DIFFERENCES present weren't so incongruous as well. Unfortunately, the romantic element is so well-worn it's threadbare, and the 'backdrop' is so inappropriate that it seems the best way to describe the resultant film is as something of a 'stiff'... ! 2/10.

The tone of this film is really difficult to convey on paper. It manages to successfully capture the elusive appeal that David Schwimmer has from time to time; it's easy for his sad-sack personality to grow annoying and pathetic, but this script managed to walk that line. The scenes of embarrassment and shame never seem overdone or cheap, and serve the story well. I especially like the down-to-earth, realistic beauty that Gwyneth Paltrow always brings to a role; she never seems like a movie star playing a real person. Because of Schwimmer's brief tenure as a star with buzz, this was seen as a box office failure, but it was never the kind of movie likely to rake in huge bucks. For what it is, a small, thoughtful, offbeat romantic comedy, The Pallbearer is a winner.