Passed Away (1992)

Is there such thing as a movie that cancels itself out? Passed Away starts out as black-comic farce, with characters you can scan in a microsecond. As the members of an Irish-American family gather for the wake and funeral of their grizzled patriarch (Jack Warden), the film serves up some fairly standard smirking-in-the-face-of-death gags. Then, an odd development: The jokes leak away, the movie turns into a moist heart tugger about romance, rebirth, and the emotional conundrums of family relationships — and through it all, the characters remain one-trait nothings.