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 Woman,” died on Friday at a residence in Los Angeles. He was 47.
His dying was confirmed by a press consultant, who didn’t cite a trigger. The Los Angeles police responded on Friday morning to a dying investigation at an deal with that matched information for Mr. Baena.
Mr. Baena usually elevated darkish thematic parts with humor in his works. There have been zombies and romance in “Life After Beth” (2014), and improper nuns in “The Little Hours” (2017).
He was married to the actress Aubrey Plaza, who performed the titular character in “Life After Beth,” a few lady who comes again from the useless after a deadly snake chunk, and acted in “The Little Hours,” and “Spin Me Spherical” (2022), which Mr. Baena directed and co-wrote with the actress Alison Brie.
Mr. Baena additionally co-wrote the 2004 movie “I Coronary heart Huckabees,” a darkish comedy that stars Dustin Hoffman, Jude Regulation, Jason Schwartzman, Lily Tomlin and Mark Wahlberg. The movie, about an environmentalist who hires “existential detectives,” was not a field workplace success however developed a cult following for its quirky plotlines and characters.
“My dad and mom had been divorced, so I’m certain the trauma of divorce helped inform my humorousness,” Mr. Baena stated in an interview on Contemporary Fiction, a YouTube channel, in 2022. “Most comedy most likely comes from drama.”
He determined to turn into a filmmaker at 11 years outdated, he advised Contemporary Fiction, when he was flipping by means of cable tv channels and tuned into Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.”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 the 1963 Federico Fellini movie “8 ½.”
“I used to be all the time drawn to weirdo films,” he stated on Contemporary Fiction. He stated he was uncovered “to a number of stuff that I believe was just a little bit left of middle, and in order that was 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 keeping with The New Yorker.
He later co-wrote “I Coronary heart Huckabees” with the director David O. Russell. The movie “captures liberal-left despair with astonishingly good humor,” the critic Manohla Dargis wrote in her 2004 evaluation of the film for The New York Instances.
Ms. Dargis added that it’s a “comedy of dialectics, during which opposing dualities slug it out like wounded lovers, nevertheless it’s nothing if not deeply honest.”
An entire checklist of Mr. Baena’s survivors was not instantly obtainable. His spouse, Ms. Plaza, turned well-known for her function as April Ludgate on the tv sequence “Parks and Recreation,” during which she performed a moody, sardonic and reluctant officer employee. She has just lately starred in movies together with “Megalopolis” (2024) and “Emily the Legal” (2022).
Along with directing and writing “Life After Beth” and “The Little Hours,” Mr. Baena wrote and directed the movies “Joshy” (2016), and “Horse Woman” (2020), which he co-wrote with Ms. Brie.
Jack Begg contributed analysis.
