It's more about watching an ensemble cast try to one-up one another's performance than anything else – and for what it is, it works.

Character eccentricities and off-kilter group dynamics play out with a comic vengeance.

The movie is like a promising date that goes nowhere.

In the expanding genre of quirky comedies, first-time writer-director Michael Clancy's messy, fitfully funny Eulogy is among the quirkiest.

Neither ditzy enough as comedy nor realistic enough as human drama to live a long life.

The occasional amusing one-liner can't compensate for the broad caricatures and awkwardly structured story.

That Eulogy has any laughs is largely a testament to the understated Romano -- he and Deschanel are the only ones in the cast who aren't straining to be funny.

The screenplay is closer in tone to an uneasy mixture of post-"Seinfeld" bile and unfocused Altmanesque satirical misanthropy. Partly because the story's structure is so haphazard, most of the jokes land with a thud.

Nine very good actors are wasted, if not embarrassed, by the thoroughly unconvincing shenanigans perpetrated by first-time writer-director Michael Clancy, while a tenth -- Zooey Deschanel -- somehow manages to float ethereally above it all with her dignity intact.

Feels like a quirky sitcom -- "Arrested Development" without the development.

If the recurring gag about Grandma's suicide attempts doesn't have you rolling in the aisles, there's always the domineering aunt whose husband sits at the kiddie table.