Directed by: Owen Kline
Starring: Daniel Zolghadri, Matthew Maher, Miles Emanuel, Marcia DeBonis
Rated R, 86 minutes
In Preston Sturges’ classic 1941 comedy “Sullivan’s Travels,” the title character, a screenwriter exhausted by the cynical artlessness of the Hollywood machine, sets out to live as a homeless man in order to understand how the other half lives and to write truthfully of hardship. He hops trains, sleeps on some floors, and gets waylaid in a labor camp. Finally he has his epiphany—people just want to laugh—and comes home.
“Funny Pages” is a spiritual descendant of Sturges’ opus, though an impish one, like a prankster pulling faces in the background of a family photo. Writer-director Owen Kline’s feature debut, which follows a teenage boy as he leaves behind his comfortable suburban life in order to pursue his dream of drawing comics, traverses similar territory—rich boy goes slumming in order to get a glimpse of “real” life—but with decidedly different results. Funnier than Sturges’ film and several shades more revolting, “Funny Pages” announces the arrival of a bold, if unpolished, filmmaker.
Before even the title appears, we are exposed to a man’s bare posterior and, moments later, his death in a horrific car crash. From this jarring opening sequence “Funny Pages” proceeds through a raunchy and often repulsive series of misadventures, as Robert (Daniel Zolghadri, “Eighth Grade”) drops out of high school, moves into a room in a seedy part of town, and there devotes himself to his drawings. The apartment into which he moves is grotesque, and in the traditional sense of the word, evoking a grotto: a windowless boiler room, cramped and subterranean and hot. A murky green fish tank sits in the corner of what passes for a kitchen, though whether anything lives within its depths is unclear. “No one can know that you lived here,” the landlord warns, sweat glistening between the strands of his bad combover.
Waiting around every corner are characters that jump out from the screen, from Robert’s boss, the cheerful public defender Cheryl (Marcia DeBonis, “13 Going on 30”), to his misanthropic would-be mentor, Wallace (Matthew Maher, “Gone Baby Gone”), to his good-natured and ever-suffering friend, Miles (Miles Emanuel, “Calidris”). Befitting a protagonist whose life revolves around cartoons and caricatures, the world around him is full of idiosyncratic buffoons, whose antics make the drab settings feel colorful and alive. On Robert’s first day on the job, Cheryl asks him to draw a quick sketch of her coworker. “Don’t let him see you do it—and make it mean,” she instructs.
The effect of this rowdy, cantankerous cast of characters is unfailingly charming, as if in defiant opposition to the film’s abundant nastiness. And “Funny Pages” is a nasty, ugly affair. Characters drool and spit, they fight dirty, they chew with their mouths open and break windows and get up to crude sexual mischief. Yet I struggle to pick a favorite among them, so vivid and absurd is each and every character that Robert encounters.
There is a more muted appeal to Robert himself. This is something of a feat; of all the wayward nincompoops and mean-spirited reprobates that people his story (and there are many), Robert is surely the worst, callous and ungrateful and, in Daniel Zolghadri’s fine performance, evidently remorseless. Like a patient friend, Owen Kline sticks with the incorrigible Robert through the grimy winter of his discontent and in the process wrings surprising depth from this deceptively simple coming-of-age tale. In Robert we see how boyish aggravations reap their embarrassing rewards, yet we also feel the bright, boisterous hope of a kid living out his oddest dreams.
Even granting the film its spirit of youthful restlessness, its roughness does sometimes interfere. The film’s final act, punctuated by a chaotic and hysterical climax, is confusingly written and paced, and also raises questions that strain credulity. Visually, too, the film is unremarkable, with a loose style that perhaps suits the off-kilter humor but largely ignores the questions of careful artistic composition that so consume Robert’s attention. There is, in other words, a sloppiness to “Funny Pages,” an inelegance that’s undeniably part of its scrappy charm but is also a distraction. It’s a telling flaw. In Robert’s world, where cartoons are a life-and-death matter and laughter is the farthest thing from anyone’s mind, the precision of comedy can’t exist without the clumsiness of tragedy. Sometimes life is just funny that way.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 9/9/22.