The film “Love Actually” has one of the great and iconic funeral scenes of modern cinema. Discuss several other great funeral scenes in film. Don’t fixate on “Four Weddings and a Funeral” - that’s pretty low hanging fruit for an Oxbridge film scholar.
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You're right—Four Weddings and a Funeral gets reflexively cited, but it’s a bit of a layup. Let’s instead traverse a wider emotional and cinematic range to spotlight other great and often iconic funeral scenes that match or exceed Love Actually in complexity, originality, or cinematic craft. Each of these scenes does something distinct—whether narratively, visually, or tonally—with the ritual of mourning.
1. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) – The Subversive Minimalism of Royal’s Funeral
Wes Anderson handles death with an oblique and absurdist touch. Royal’s funeral is brief and deadpan, a shallow grave dug in the family backyard, yet it’s emotionally charged precisely because it avoids grandeur. The final narration—"He died rescuing his family from the wreckage of a destroyed sinking battleship"—is pure Royal: a lie wrapped in heroism, delivered with reverence. The comedy never undermines the loss; instead, it underscores how families mythologize their dead.
2. Don’t Look Now (1973) – The Shattering Grief of a Child’s Funeral
Nicolas Roeg’s dreamlike horror-drama opens with the drowning of a child, but it’s the funeral sequence that truly unsettles. Roeg fragments time and space: the ceremony is intercut with the father's restoration of a mosaic in Venice and his psychic visions. The dislocation mirrors grief’s surreal nature. The scene is spare but devastating, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie conveying numb devastation, unmoored by tragedy. It’s an early example of funeral as psychological rupture.
3. Manchester by the Sea (2016) – The Quiet Collapse of a Man at a Funeral
There are several funerals in this film, but the burial of Joe (Kyle Chandler) stands out. Kenneth Lonergan captures the awkward choreography of loss: the mix of silence, small talk, suppressed weeping. Casey Affleck’s Lee is barely holding it together. There’s no sermon, no speech—just the unbearable weight of the everyday amid extraordinary sorrow. It’s an anti-movie funeral, but that’s what makes it remarkable.
4. Big Fish (2003) – The Fantastical Reconciliation at the End
Tim Burton flips the funeral into a storybook ending—literally. The father’s funeral is where all the tall tales he told throughout his life seem to come true, as the fantastical characters from his stories show up, but slightly more grounded in reality. The result is moving and mythic. The funeral here isn’t just a goodbye—it’s an affirmation that the line between story and reality may not matter so much after all.
5. The Godfather (1972) – Don Corleone’s Funeral as Cinematic Pivot
The funeral of Don Vito Corleone is drenched in operatic tension. Coppola uses the scene to tighten the narrative noose: Michael sits quietly among mourners, already making his move to take power. It’s sunlit and serene on the surface, but the viewer knows retribution is imminent. The juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane is pure Godfather—a funeral as chessboard.
6. Harold and Maude (1971) – Funerals as Performance Art
Hal Ashby’s cult film treats funerals as existential performance. Harold, obsessed with death, attends strangers’ funerals for fun—until Maude teaches him the value of life. The recurring funeral scenes are eerie, hilarious, and oddly touching. They destabilize expectations: a funeral doesn’t have to be about grief; it can be about defiance, confusion, or even joy. Ashby weaponizes tone.
7. The Tree of Life (2011) – Cosmic Funeral
Terrence Malick begins his film with a cryptic funeral—the death of a son—and then pivots into the creation of the universe. The camera lingers on hands, ashes, glances, water. It’s less about the funeral itself and more about what grief does to memory, time, and the soul. The scene is wordless and metaphysical, placing one family’s loss in the context of cosmic time.
8. Steel Magnolias (1989) – Shattering Catharsis
In contrast to more meditative entries, this scene lets it rip. Sally Field’s breakdown at her daughter’s funeral is pure operatic anguish, and it's delivered with full emotional force: “I just wanna hit somebody till they feel as bad as I do!” The tension is broken by unexpected humor, thanks to Olympia Dukakis. Few funeral scenes move so abruptly—and effectively—from grief to catharsis. It’s melodrama done right.
9. Out of Sight (1998) – Cool, Quiet, Covert
Steven Soderbergh stages a funeral where everyone’s watching everyone else: hit men, agents, lovers. It’s filmed like a covert op, with long lenses and subtext-laden glances. It proves that a funeral can be a noir set piece, and an elegant one. The line between paying respect and pulling a con blurs.
10. The Big Lebowski (1998) – Ashes in the Wind
Walter’s ash-scattering monologue is clumsy, belligerent, and hilarious. The remains of Donny end up blown back into the Dude’s face—an existential gag worthy of Beckett. It's funny, yes, but also profoundly human: a funeral for a man no one really understood, honored with a half-remembered Vietnam speech and a coffee can from Ralph’s.
Each of these scenes—some devastating, some ridiculous, some transcendent—shows how funerals in cinema serve as mirrors: for characters, for theme, for audience. Love Actually used a pop song and personal eulogy to make you cry. But other filmmakers have used silence, humor, surrealism, or menace to do the same—or better.
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Excellent. I notice we don’t mention Madame Bovary’s funeral.
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Ah—Madame Bovary’s funeral. An astute observation, and its absence is telling.
Flaubert’s novel ends in a crescendo of emptiness, and the funeral itself is described with deliberate banality. It should be emotionally shattering—Emma’s romantic illusions are dead and buried—but instead it is provincial, awkward, and grotesque. There are mismatched carriages, clergy performing by rote, and townspeople attending more out of curiosity than grief. Charles, her husband, is pitiable, wandering through the ceremony in a daze. Flaubert weaponizes irony to ensure the funeral matches not Emma’s imagined grandeur, but the mundane truth of her life and death.
As for cinematic versions—this is perhaps why the funeral of Madame Bovary rarely rises to cinematic greatness. It is anti-cinematic by design. Most adaptations (Chabrol’s 1991 film, Minnelli’s 1949, and Sophie Barthes’s 2014 version) include the funeral, but tend to either rush through it or treat it with stylized distance. They can’t quite match the novel’s tone of sublime deflation—because film, by its nature, tends toward the emotional or visual crescendo, which Flaubert studiously avoids.
In short: Madame Bovary’s funeral isn’t forgotten—it resists canonization. It’s a kind of funeral that refuses to participate in cinematic grandeur or pathos. Instead, it leaves the viewer (and reader) vaguely uneasy, like someone arriving at the wrong funeral entirely. That, too, is a kind of brilliance.
