The story sounds a lot like a typical recipe for a farce, and indeed it is. Much of Plots with a View is about people pretending, which is really what all farces are about. The humour in this film is quite gentle and of good taste, though it often involves death and the dead, and especially the way we deal with them. Poking fun at our often solemn funerary habits is Christopher Walken’s character Frank Featherbed, an American mortician bent on revolutionising funerary habits in this small Welsh village. He believes in Las Vegas-style show-numbers in church and client-binding absurdities such as "second burial for half price".

Despite Featherbed's character, the humour remains so gentle that it might also be the movie’s biggest obstacle. It never really gets daring or outrageous, and as the character are not really developed either, what remains are some rather tame jokes that will make the audience chuckle rather than laugh and forget all about this comedy once the lights come up.

The cast is an impressive list of Oscar winners (Walken) nominees (Watts, Blethyn) and generally esteemed actors (Molina, Pugh), though it feels as if they all came together on two rainy Saturday afternoons in Wales and decided to improvise a slapstick-comedy. It all feels rather by the numbers, with none of the main characters having trying to get their mouth around a Welsh accent except for Pugh, who is Welsh. It has some charm and some chuckles, but generally, wait for it to pass on TV when you have nothing better to do. It is not worth a cinema-ticket.

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