I knew going into seeing Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant directed and written Cemetery Junction that it wasn’t going to be their usually material like The Office or Extras or similar in vain to Gervais’ film The Invention of Lying.

Cemetery Junction is definitely a departure for Gervais and Merchant. It is a coming of age drama set in 1973 Cemetery Junction, a road junction in Reading, Berkshire, England. It is the area that Gervais grew up in.

Gervais isn’t the star of the film but instead plays a very small role as the father of the central character, Freddie Taylor (Christian Cooke). Freddie is a working-class lad that wants to better his life than that of his father (Gervais), a factory worker. Freddie lands a job as a door-to-door life insurance sales man working for Ralph Fiennes’ Kendrick and under the mentorship of Matthew Goode’s Mike Ramsay. Freddi’s friends, Bruce (Tom Hughes) and Snork Jack Doolan) sees their lives in Cemetery Junction just fine and continue on drinking, smoking and getting into fights. They don’t see why Freddie wants to improve his. His new outlook on his life gets further shaken when he gets reunited with his childhood sweetheart Julie (Felicity Jones), who happens to be his boss’s daughter and the fiancee of Mike. Julie opens his eyes wide to want to see his life beyond Cemetery Junction.

As Freddie starts to observe his new world and his old world, you can see all the cliches of movies and can predictably see how the movie will end. It’s not spoiling anything by saying that you know that Mike is not the right match for Julie. That Kendrick, who was from Cemetery Junction, is a cold fish that only cares about his business and hasn’t recognized or acknowledged his wife (Emily Watson) in any way for a long time unless it’s during work functions. You know that Mrs. Kendrick is miserable by the way Gervais has her sitting by herself in the kitchen just getting ready to serve her husband tea.

There were some comedic moments in the film but really only when Gervais is on screen and from Anne Reid who plays his mother who zings off one-liners. Merchant pops up and delivers a funny one-line cameo and Karl Pilkington has an silent on screen cameo. I was waiting for Barry from Eastenders to show up.

Cooke is very charismatic as Freddie and Jones was also good as Julie but their roles are so cliched and their performances were by the book.

The most annoying performance is from Doolan as Snork. I totally didn’t like this character at all and felt that his character was there because it is stereotypical of coming-of-age dramas to have a fat lovable loser friend.

Watson’s character as the sad, lonely wife, as I have to say again cliched but in Watson’s capable hands you defintely feel for her.

I definitely appreciate what Gervais was trying to do with this movie and you can tell it was a personal story that he wanted to tell. I just wished that it wasn’t so cliched and had just a few more laughs. I could tell why this movie went direct-to-DVD in North America (it was released on August 17, 2010).

Cemetery Junction is playing until August 25, 2010 at Vancouver’s Van City Theatre. Click here for tickets.