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.
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 couple of 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 have been divorced, so I’m certain the trauma of divorce helped inform my humorousness,” Mr. Baena mentioned in an interview on Contemporary Fiction, a YouTube channel, in 2022. “Most comedy in all probability comes from drama.”
He determined to develop into a filmmaker at 11 years previous, he informed Contemporary Fiction, when he was flipping via 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 at all times drawn to weirdo motion pictures,” he mentioned on Contemporary Fiction. He mentioned he was uncovered “to a variety of stuff that I feel was a little bit bit left of heart, 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 line 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 evaluate of the film for The New York Occasions.
Ms. Dargis added that it’s a “comedy of dialectics, during which opposing dualities slug it out like wounded lovers, however it’s nothing if not deeply honest.”
A whole record of Mr. Baena’s survivors was not instantly out there. His spouse, Ms. Plaza, turned well-known for her position 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 Prison” (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.
