Cemetery Junction

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have been on a long roll in British TV, from Meet Ricky Gervais (2000) through The Office and Extras. The writing-producing-directing team made their feature film debut with Cemetery Junction in 2010, and the roll seemed to have ended. Straining to be a cohesive and funny sequence of incidents, their movie is scrappy, mostly crude and rarely witty. It clearly needed experienced producers to tell the creative pair where to sharpen their screenplay, strengthen its narrative and tighten the direction.

Set in 1973, the very English movie covers the coming-of-age for a trio of youths (and compares, unfavourably, with similar period pieces such as An Education). Gervais and Merchant's likeable likely lads live in a fictitious town, Cemetery Junction, near Reading (the birthplace of Gervais). Location shots portray a town with a split personality, part picture-postcard rural village, part slummy housing.

There's also a factory where one youth (played by Tom Hughes) works; he's a belligerent scrapper who despises his sick beer-swilling single father. At the local railway station, a second youth is a foul-mouthed simple-minded chubby nonentity (Jack Doolan). Their mutual friend, Freddie, is the son of a bigoted factory worker (Gervais, in laid-back comic mode) whose own live-in mother is a sharper-tongued bigot (Anne Reid, in a more acidic, and funnier, mode). Freddie's mother is also a bitch, and it's a mystery how Freddie could be such a handsome, long-haired, good-natured, easily-influenced central figure (Christian Cooke, a British TV series actor like his two co-leads).

Seeking a better life, he goes to work for an insurance company whose insensitive boss is from the same town (Ralph Fiennes, continuing to pop up with sneering stylishness in far too many sub-par cameo roles). He chauvinistically ignores his wife (Emily Watson dressed in dutifully ignorable fashion, and displaying a scene-stealing range of silent moues and eye glances). He plans to get his daughter (Jessica Jones) married to a smarmy super-salesman (Matthew Goode, back from A Single Man and other better roles in Hollywood).

This being an English comidrama, we also get a stack of unbelievable plot-supporting time-filling characters a la Richard Curtis: avuncular local policeman, snide local detective, cafeteria eccentrics, sweetly simple plain girl, sexy black dancer. There are the customary banquet,party and disco scenes (expensively staged gifts for Equity's real extras), and the usual novice movie director's visual flourishes via panes of glass, B&W photo freezes and pans of pretty landscapes.

Gervais can do better, and did so recently in Hollywood with his debut solo writing-directing-acting turn, The Invention of Lying. Merchant didn't work on that, and Gervais may need to ask himself if an old working relationship has become a creative drawback.