Laughing at death

Some movies have an ability to make death — even murder — seem like a normal, non-horrifying, even hilarious part of life, which I understand that it is, but yet when it happens, it obviously doesn’t feel that way. It takes an amazing sort of film to give us that kind of realism.
Pedro Almodovar’s 2006 Oscar-nominated “Volver” (R) is just such an amazing film. A lot of jokes help demystify brutal kitchen carnage and opinioned ghosts, but it’s not just the jokes. The opening scene at a cemetery showing dozens of women cleaning their mothers’, fathers’ and husbands’ gravestones, has the same seriousness as those little Day of the Dead skeletons, the happy ones playing guitars, dancing in top hats or driving fire trucks.
And yes, in the movie even murder has a little of that bony joy. Obviously, human murders are not funny or exactly commonplace. But in nature, murder is not a big surprise. And that’s the kind of murder we see in “Volver:” one wild animal (but, you know, a human) killing another simply because it would have been unreasonable not to.
For those who like emotion, there’s plenty of that, too — especially when a dead person hears her daughter sing. That was really quite beautiful.

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