A sketchy premise
Funny Pages Cast: Daniel Zolghadri, Matthew Maher, Miles Emanuel Director: Owen Kline Duration: 1 h 26 m Funny Pages opens Aug. 26 in select cities across Canada.
The ’90s and early ’00s were the heyday for movies about neurotic, cantankerous underground comic book artists. Terry Zwigoff gave us the Robert Crumb documentary Crumb, then went on to direct Ghost World and Art School Confidential, based on the works of Daniel Clowes. Meanwhile, Paul Giamatti wowed audiences by playing Harvey Pekar in American Splendor.
All of which makes Funny Pages feel like an artifact from a different time, and an oddly irrelevant one at that.
Though clearly trying for a similar vibe — it opens with a trail of Crumb-like images, humans drawn as grotesque and hyper-sexualized, disproportionate caricatures — there’s no based-in-fact backing, save for the admittedly fertile mind of writer-director Owen Kline, whose first feature this is.
Kline may be best remembered for playing the younger brother in Noah Baumbach’s 2005 film The Squid and the Whale. Here he casts Daniel Zolghadri as Robert, another awkward youth, as desperate to be a cartoonist as his parents are for him to go to university and get a real job. Inspired by his high-school mentor (Stephen Adly Guirgis) he gets a low-paying job at Legal Aid, rents a hellish room in the seediest corner of New Jersey, and tries to make something of himself.
The brief timeline of the film doesn’t allow for much coming-of-age, though Robert does cross paths with Wallace (Matthew Maher), an honest-to-goodness comic-book artist (now unemployed) who brusquely informs the kid that he was basically an assistant to an assistant. Robert remains professionally smitten nonetheless.
The humour here is as dark as printer’s ink, its pinball-ricochet timing a hallmark of producers Benny and Josh Safdie (Good Time, Uncut Gems). And it may not be to all tastes — there’s an undercurrent of violence in Maher’s performance that is clearly designed to make audiences squirm.
There’s also a weird, anachronistic tone to the setting. For a large swath of the film I was certain it took place in the early 1990s or before, until a fairly modern laptop had me revise that estimate by at least a decade.
None of these details are enough to derail Funny Pages completely, but they were distracting enough to let my mind wander to some of those older, better films, which is never a good thing. If you haven’t seen them, you may want to seek them out first. Or, free of their shadows, you might find this tale to be enough. ★★½