In Ghost World, a middle-aged loser named Seymour confides to a young woman, “Well, maybe I don’t want to meet someone who shares my interests. I hate my interests.” Seymour likes to collect obscure jazz records and kitschy Americana, so he is not unlike the adult characters in Funny Pages, who cultivate obscure collections as a substitute for normal relationships and social skills. The difference between these films, however, is that Ghost World has curiosity about what drives its unlovable losers, and the patience to critique them with kindness. Funny Pages is more of a geek show, a miserable tour through forgotten corners of New Jersey that only achieves comedy by keeping the characters and situations at arm’s length. It is not cruel, exactly, but is frequently nasty in a deeply unpleasant way.
Admittedly, writer and director Owen Kline nails how this should all look and feel. Most of Funny Pages takes place in dirty, fluorescent-lit interiors, so you can practically smell the sickly pallor of everyone’s unwashed skin and the messy rooms they inhabit. Maladjusted teen Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) is happier than a pig in shit to hang around these spaces, and in the opening scene, he is spending time with his overweight art teacher Mr. Katano (Stephen Adly Guirgis). Mr. Katano thinks Robert has potential as a comic book artist in the R. Crumb mold, so he shows Robert vulgar funny pages, the kind where the cartoonist focuses on engorged genitals.
The teacher, already pushing the ethical limits of his relationship with his student, has an ulterior motive: he coaxes Robert to draw him nude, probably because he’s a pervert, so Robert leaves in an awkward huff. Kline plays the situation more for laughs, even if Robert’s instincts are correct, and it only gets more uncomfortable from there. Kline’s background does not help matters – he is the son of Oscar-winner Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates – further suggesting he approaches the material as a tourist in the vein of Pulp’s “Common People.”
In the aftermath of the Mr. Katano incident, Robert gets arrested and announces to his parents (Josh Pais and Maria Dizzia) that he is not returning to high school. They protest, then decide to let him try living on his own, a kind of tough love approach. Robert finds a seedy apartment in Trenton, the kind of place where his landlord (Michael Townsend Wright) has a terrible combover and explains that Robert cannot tell anyone he lives there. The Safdie Brothers, the creative team behind Good Time and Uncut Gems, produced this film, and you can see their influence during these scenes. Kline’s camera lingers on one disgusting detail after another, a kind of anti-stylized approach that is meant to engage all your senses – smell in particular.
A plot does not form until the film’s back half, when Robert realizes that his middle-aged acquaintance (Matthew Maher) used to work in a comic book studio. Wallace is the Seymour character, a misanthropic loser who nurses his anger and contains violent impulses. Through Wallace, Kline almost pushes Funny Pages into a normal coming-of-age story: through a series of increasingly violent mishaps, Robert realizes that his idea of an uneducated life, free from parental control, is not all that it’s cracked up to be. The comic escalation that leads Robert to this epiphany is borne out of gross-out comedy, not any interest in human behavior. Robert’s friend Miles (Miles Emanuel) appears when it is most convenient, while Wallace’s erratic conduct veers from pathetic to implausible. The cumulative effect is exhausting, a parade of losers who serve as little more than a cautionary tale for a bratty teen who actively discourages us from feeling any sympathy for him.
Funny Pages may be set in the present, but it seems to exist outside time, insofar that Robert and the others only care about the hermetically-sealed world in which they find themselves. Kline is observant enough to make a key distinction: whereas Wallace and the landlord have no hope, Robert gains no authenticity through living this way deliberately. Kline knows this is all unpleasant, and his gambit is that it’s funny on top of that. It is misguided “cringe comedy” pitched at its dirtiest, a kind of mean-spirited anthropological experiment that is more about judgment than human nature.
Photo courtesy of A24
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