tlavideo.com

Review

Only intermittently funny with a suspect comic intuition, The Pallbearer will do little to repair the image of the Generation X'er as a slacker and a whiner. This plays more like a lurid study of alienation than a quirky comedy of errors. Schwimmer makes a big-screen starring debut portraying a character not much different from his small-screen persona on "Friends." In what could have been a "Friends" plot line, Schwimmer is invited to be a pallbearer -- and then give the eulogy -- for a former classmate he can't remember. He soon becomes romantically involved with the deceased man's grieving mother (Hershey) while at the same time trying to initiate a relationship with Paltrow. Besides the absence of much humor, the screenplay's handling of Hershey as the "older woman" is despicably insensitive; and though sometimes personable, Schwimmer's act soon grows tiresome.