R.I.P. Jeff Baena

The news that director Jeff Baena was found dead at his home, an apparent suicide, has really saddened me. And also thrown me off. Suicide always does. It’s upsetting. He was only 47 years old.

I’ve admired his films, both as a writer and as a director (he co-wrote I Heart Huckabees, and also wrote and directed five feature films: Life After Beth, Joshy, The Little Hours, Horse Girl, and Spin Me Round). Plaza was the star of Life After Beth, a zombie comedy, and it was where they met. They got married in 2021, after being together for a decade. Plaza would also appear in Joshy, The Little Hours and Spin Me Round. He worked with the same talented group of people – Alison Brie, Adam Pally, Molly Shannon, Dave Franco, Fred Armisen. The first film of his I saw was The Little Hours, and it was such a lunatic screwball I could barely believe it. In a world where comedies barely exist anymore, here was the miracle of The Little Hours, which made me laugh – out loud – all the way through. The film has such an effervescent creative vibe, packed with schtick and “bits” and what we in college called “lazzis” (once we learned about commedia dell’arte we took that term and ran with it). Baena steered the ship, make no mistake. The cast was incredible – all very funny people – but there are plenty of comedies filled with funny people that aren’t funny at all. Understanding comedy is subjective, The Little Hours – based on one of the stories in The Decameron – was SO funny to me. It’s my kind of humor.

I reviewed The Little Hours for Ebert. In it I tried to describe why the movie worked so well, and I am so glad I gave credit to Baena for much of it:

What could have been—in less confident hands—a one-joke sketch becomes, instead, a consistently wacko screwball. Baena knows (like Boccaccio knew) that the main thing—Nuns Gone Wild—is funny. The three extremely funny actresses go to town with all of the possibilities. But Baena also gets that smaller moments of humor act as glue to keep the whole thing together. He is sensitive to the comedic possibilities in a glance, a pause, a visual. Perhaps most strikingly, Baena has a fine-tuned sense of the absurd. There’s a bit with a turtle walking slowly by a doorway that is such a quiet little moment, really, but it has an enormous comedic impact.

Spin Me Round, featuring Baena’s usual repertory of actors – Brie, Shannon, Plaza, Armisen, Tim Hiedecker – wasn’t as successful as The Little Hours (but what movie is, let’s be real), but it still had that spark of humor and creativity, and the actors were given a lot of space to create these wacky characters, and then they all were just set loose in this crazy set of circumstances. Behavior is what is funny to me. And Baena’s films were so full of behavior. I reviewed Spin Me Round too.

Baena’s work often includes strange juxtapositions like this, tragedy alongside comedy, horror alongside humor, the films wriggling free of genre expectations. His first credit as a screenwriter was “I Heart Huckabees,” after all. Baena’s work as a director (“Joshy,” “Life After Beth,” “Horse Girl“) is a little uneven, but when it works it works. 2017’s “The Little Hours,” based on a story from The Decameron, is a straight-up French farce, where horny medieval nuns spout contemporary snarky dialogue and chase around the hot male in their midst. It’s hilarious. Baena attracts an impressive roster of actors, and it’s not hard to see why.

I hate that this happened. I am sorry he was clearly in so much anguish. I am so sorry for his friends and family. His films gave me a lot of joy.