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 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 tackle that matched data 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 couple of lady who comes again from the lifeless 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 positive the trauma of divorce helped inform my humorousness,” Mr. Baena mentioned in an interview on Recent Fiction, a YouTube channel, in 2022. “Most comedy most likely comes from drama.”
He determined to turn out to be a filmmaker at 11 years previous, he informed Recent Fiction, when he was flipping by 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 Recent Fiction. He mentioned he was uncovered “to a number 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 accordance 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, by which opposing dualities slug it out like wounded lovers, but it surely’s nothing if not deeply honest.”
Along with directing and writing “Life After Beth” and “The Little Hours,” Mr. Baena wrote and directed the movies “Joshy” (2016), and “Horse Lady” (2020), which he co-wrote with Ms. Brie.
His spouse, Ms. Plaza, grew to become well-known for her function as April Ludgate on the tv collection “Parks and Recreation,” by which she performed a moody, sardonic and reluctant officer employee. She has not too long ago starred in movies together with “Megalopolis” (2024) and “Emily the Felony” (2022).
Along with Ms. Plaza, survivors embrace his mom, Barbara Stern, and stepfather Roger Stern; his father, Scott Baena, and stepmother, Michele Baena; a brother, Brad Baena, and stepsister Bianca Gabay and stepbrother Jed Fluxman.
Jack Begg contributed analysis.
