Jeff Baena, the director and screenwriter who co-wrote the darkish comedy “I Coronary heart Huckabees” and who directed movies together with “Life After Beth” and “Horse Lady,” died Friday. He was 47.
His dying was confirmed by a spokesperson who didn’t give a trigger.
Mr. Baena typically elevates darkish thematic components with humor in his works. There have been zombies and romance in “Life after Beth” (2014), and misfit nuns in “The small hours” (2017).
He was married to actress Aubrey Plaza, who performed the titular character in Life After Beth, a couple of girl who comes again from the useless after a deadly snake chew, and starred in The Small Hours and Flip Me Round (2022), which Mr. Baena directed and co-wrote with actress Alison Brie.
Mr. Baena additionally co-wrote the 2004 movie. I Coronary heart Huckabees, a darkish comedy starring Dustin Hoffman, Jude Legislation, Jason Schwartzman, Lily Tomlin and Mark Wahlberg. The movie a couple of conservationist who hires “existential detectives” was not a field workplace success, however developed a cult following for its quirky storylines and characters.
“My dad and mom have been divorced, so I am certain the trauma of the divorce helped form my humorousness,” Mr. Baena stated in an interview with Fresh fictionYouTube channel, in 2022. “Most comedy most likely comes from drama.”
He determined to turn out to be a filmmaker at age 11, he advised Recent Fiction, when he was flipping by means of cable channels and watching Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. He was so intrigued by the movie that he requested his father to take him to a video rental retailer, the place they rented 1963. A film by Federico Fellini “8 ½.”
“I’ve at all times been drawn to bizarre motion pictures,” he advised Recent Fiction. He stated he was uncovered to “lots of issues that I believed have been slightly bit left of heart, so it grew to become normalized for me,” including, “I sought it out.”
Jeffrey Baena was born on June 29, 1977. and grew up in Miami. He graduated from New York College in 1999, the place he majored in movie and minored in medieval and renaissance research, in accordance with The New Yorker.
He later co-wrote I Coronary heart Huckabees with director David O. Russell. The movie “captures liberal-left despair with astonishingly good humor,” wrote critic Manohla Dargis in his 2004 review of the movie for The New York Instances.
Ms. Dargis added that it was “a comedy of dialectics the place opposing dualities duke it out like harm lovers, nevertheless it’s nothing if not deeply honest.”
A full record of Mr. Baena’s survivors was not instantly out there. His spouse, Mrs. Plaza, grew to become well-known for her position as April Ludgate on the tv sequence Parks and Recreation, by which she performed a sullen, sardonic and reluctant worker. She has lately appeared in movies together with Megalopolis (2024) and Emily the Outlaw (2022).
Along with directing and screenwriting Life After Beth and The Little Hours, Mr. Baena wrote and directed the movies “Joshi” (2016) and “Horse Lady” (2020), which he co-wrote with Ms. Bree.
Jack Begg contributed analysis.
