Exploring the dramatic and comedy sides of films, highlighting Naked, A Serious Man, Beau Is Afraid, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and Brazil among others, and their unique approaches to comedy and drama
Comedies that are easy to watch are nice and all, and there’s also no shortage of them. Rom-coms are especially reliable, if you're after something easy, and then even a good many dramedies – even if they get, you know, dramatic at points – are fairly gentle.
If something’s split pretty evenly between comedy and drama, you can probably expect to feel happy as much as you're possibly going to feel sad. With the following films, though, that’s not the case. Some of these are dramedies that still have lots of comedy, but the dramatic stuff hits brutally hard, and potentially ends up overwhelming most of the comedic stuff.
And then there are a few movies here that are broadly comedic throughout, and not necessarily dramedies, but they find unique ways to be heavy-going and overall anxiety-inducing. 10 'Naked' A film without too much by way of narrative, Naked is perhaps best described as a character study, and that character being studied is an immensely unlikable one. He sort of just rampages around London, clashing with a bunch of people, and you have to follow him around the whole time, which is all supposed to be frustrating, alongside being somewhat eye-opening and maybe darkly funny.
It’s so heavy regarding the comedy side of things, though, that Naked will probably feel like more of a drama, at least to most people. This is something Mike Leigh often does, though with his dramadies, there is usually some bittersweet element thrown in there, while Naked is more just cynical and effectively soul-crushing throughout, all the while being one of the grittiest and dirtiest-looking movies of its decade . 9 'A Serious Man' While it’s not the heaviest or most intense Coen Brothers movie, seeing as Blood Simple and No Country for Old Men exist, A Serious Man is probably their most harrowing comedy.
Calling it a dramedy is much more accurate, admittedly, since it’s about a physics professor experiencing his life fall apart, bit by bit, all in a way that suggests the universe itself has it out for him. It’s like the Coens doing a Franz Kafka adaptation, but then also, it feels like a more modern spin on the biblical Book of Job .
There is a balance between comedy and something more nightmarish achieved throughout A Serious Man, with the Coens making it all look effortless the way they’ve so often been capable of doing, at their best. 8 'Beau Is Afraid' Beau Is Afraid is a good movie to bring up right after A Serious Man, since it’s also a movie about a seemingly cursed individual going through an immense ordeal.
Here, though, the whole thing is more of a physical journey, since the titular Beau has to travel across a great distance to attend his mother’s funeral, and then it’s all more grueling for the audience, too, owing to the fact that Beau Is Afraid clocks in at about three hours long. There is perhaps even more anxiety, misery, and misfortune here than you'd expect, based on the already downbeat films that were Hereditary and Midsommar.
Ari Aster pulls perhaps the fewest punches he’s ever pulled for a film, which is saying a lot, when he also did the likes of Hereditary and Eddington. It’s not as firmly within the horror genre as his first two movies, but there is perhaps even more anxiety, misery, and misfortune here than you'd expect, based on the already downbeat films that were Hereditary and Midsommar.
And Beau Is Afraid does it all while being a sometimes quite ridiculous – and almost always surreal – comedy. 7 'Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb' Like most movies that deal with nuclear war, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb isn't very cheery, though it does stand out for being incredibly funny. Much of that humor is there so you're taken off guard when things do ultimately progress toward the territory you might expect a movie about the lead-up to the end of the world to be, but still, it’s funny while it’s funny.
And then Dr. Strangelove is heavy where it counts. It’s not really a balancing act sort of thing, since it’s a farce, and then there’s unfathomable destruction.
The approach works somehow, though, since it might well be the film people think of first whenever they hear the term “nuclear war” referenced in relation to cinema. 6 'Brazil' A classic dystopian movie that’s also kind of a comedy, Brazil is about a futuristic society in which very little works, and then everything that only sort of works keeps getting worse. It feels like things are falling apart more and more with every scene, and things keep going particularly poorly for the main character, Sam Lowry, who’s a victim of bureaucracy and, eventually, just about everything/everyone else.
It’s a lot, and Brazil is non-stop with all the surreal and disturbing things that happen, with a pretty much manic pace and a runtime of nearly 2.5 hours, so you end up coming away from it feeling like you’ve watched enough panicky stuff to power several normal-sized comedic thrillers.
And then, after being so imaginative and weirdly funny, Brazil finds a way to twist the knife about as well as the conclusion to the aforementioned Dr. Strangelove also did. 5 'Anomalisa' Of the three movies Charlie Kaufman has written and directed , Anomalisa is the most comedic, but that’s not saying a great deal when his other directorial efforts are Synecdoche, New York and I’m Thinking of Ending Things. When you look at just his writing credits, you'll find a good deal of heaviness there, too, since Kaufman penned the likes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the existentially harrowing Being John Malkovich.
With Anomalisa, it’s got some of the usual Charlie Kaufman-type themes, and it’s largely about a lonely man finding a connection with someone and then dealing with the emotional highs and lows that come with such an experience. It’s also a stop-motion film, which means it can count itself among the more intense animated movies of all time, too. 4 'Bad Boy Bubby' Bad Boy Bubby is hard to recommend, and it’s also quite hard to talk about, even if , it’s a good film, and it’s got a simple premise.
Like, it more or less boils down to being about a man who’s been heavily sheltered all his life getting freedom for the first time as a 35-year-old, wandering the streets of Adelaide and meeting various unusual people. If you get into why he was locked up, how he broke free, and then more specifics regarding the people he meets, you're probably also straying out of PG territory, since the details here are intense.
Bad Boy Bubby is very heavy-going, for something that’s kind of a comedy, and shocks with regard to what it’s willing to show, as well as some of the stuff it’s willing to explore thematically. 3 'Mary and Max' To keep going with the downbeat Australian movies for a bit, Mary and Max might be more depressing than Bad Boy Bubby, even if it’s ultimately not as aggressively intense and is a bit easier to watch. It’s also about outsiders and loneliness, with the two titular characters being pen pals on opposite sides of the world who also both have different personal struggles they're dealing with.
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It’s also a little in line with Anomalisa, seeing as neither animated movie is the kind you'd want to show younger viewers, and also, for both films, there’s probably more drama than outright comedy. If you don’t mind having your soul crushed at least a little bit , then Mary and Max is still worth watching.
It’s simultaneously a very well-executed and particularly sadness-filled animated dramedy. 2 'Man Bites Dog' Man Bites Dog is about a serial killer doing his thing while being followed by a documentary film crew, the members of which get more and more wrapped up in the crimes he’s committing. It might not sound like the kind of thing that would necessarily fit within the comedy genre, but much of the movie is played for laughs of a very dark variety.
It’s a satire-heavy thriller of sorts that’s also quite ahead of its time, feeling like something a bit newer with how it tackles themes surrounding the nature of real and fictional violence, all the while also being novel as a mockumentary/found footage film.
So much of Man Bites Dog is quite difficult to watch, yet by design, and it has the kind of notorious reputation where you're probably aware, to some extent, of what you're getting into before you actually sit down to watch the thing. 1 'Happiness' The reputation Happiness has is even harder to avoid – or not know about – than Man Bites Dog, since it might well be the gold standard for uncomfortable comedies. It tackles a large number of emotionally intense things, all in uncompromising ways, to the point where it’s the rare movie that might well, in one way or another, feel like it’s a bit too much for pretty much everyone.
The too muchness of it all is intentional, of course, and some might be able to soldier on through enough of the film to appreciate how unafraid it is of just about everything. Happiness touches upon various things that don’t really get talked about in most other movies, and while some of the unwaveringly uncomfortable moments here are darkly funny, some aren’t, and so you probably won’t really come away from this one feeling much of the titular emotion, to say the least.
Happiness NC-17 Comedy Drama Release Date October 11, 1998 Runtime 139 Minutes Director Todd Solondz Writers Todd Solondz Cast Powered by Expand Collapse
Dramedies Dramatics Comedies Movies Michael Leigh The Coen Brothers Ari Aster Dystopian Comedy Brazil
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