Hipster satire critiques the American dream.
Everyone in Funny Pages is a self-aware caricature, but only 17-year-old Robert Bleckheim (Daniel Zolghadri) has the impulse to turn that awareness into comic-book drawings, He’s a surrogate for 30-year-old writer-director Owen Kline, whose debut this is — part of the idiosyncratic indie movement already typified by the film’s celebrated gonzo producers Josh and Benny Safdie.
Robert belongs to the spoiled-brat generation that takes its advantages for granted. His teenage revolt, as an only child to a couple in Princeton, N.J. (“There is no middle-class there”), takes the form of rejecting school and pursuing a career as a comic-book artist. An obese teacher (Stephen Adly Guirgis) seduces-encourages him, “Always subvert!” It’s a class-based directive, repeated when Robert gets arrested and then works for his public defender (Marcia deBonis), who asks him to improvise a caricature of her co-worker: “Make it mean,” she says.
Funny Pages jostles the viewer between meanness and affection through Robert/Kline’s vision that people are either laughably unlike us or pathetically just like us. Robert briefly fancies work as a court sketch artist, which is Kline’s way of connecting the mundane to what’s suspicious and criminal. Thus, the movie is literally ugly (harshly photographed by Sean Price Williams and Hunter Zimny), yet not entirely dismissible. It is saved by Kline’s cruel, funny alertness to something that’s gone wrong in American society among those dissatisfied by pursuit of the dream.
The movie starts sordidly, with Robert perusing an old “Henry” flip-book, a “Tijuana bible” that depicts popular comic-book figures as pornography. From there, Kline gets into the grunginess of American life. Seeking independence, Robert rents space in an overheated hovel with pop-culture degenerate Barry (Michael Townsend Wright), but soon returns to his homestead, inviting school friend Miles (Miles Emanuel) and felon Wallace (Matthew Maher) on Christmas –“The worst day of the year!” Robert’s mother sarcastically welcomes him: “Your bed is made.”
This sets up a climax where hysteria and slapstick (resentment and violence) finally provide the context for Robert’s naïve worldview and artistic ambitions.
Robert/Kline uses comic-book art to exaggerate human experience. Not the pastime of superhero comics but, as Robert specifies, “I’m into humor comics and undergrounds,” the “smart” kid’s alternative: Robert Crumb social satire, even Matt Groening’s Akbar and Jeff. (In fact, Robert’s caricature of the weird roomies living in sweaty squalor is titled “Burning in Hell,” like Groening’s “Life in Hell” series.)
The humor of Funny Pages uses hellish “realism” as both a defense of — and critique against — growing up into adult responsibility. This is always the moral of Safdie style. Their 2010 film, Daddy Longlegs (now available from Criterion), was an earlier subversion of family life featuring a movie-projectionist hero who trades vintage Harvey Kurtzman comic-book art to pay a babysitter.
Kline’s realization that family, friends, acquaintances — fellow American citizens — are weird and selfish creatures derives from desperate adolescent escapism. Robert has a juvenile fight with Miles. (“You have assh*** taste.” “You love the taste of assh***.”) They’re incels without much interest in girls but are already cynical about the world. Safdie filmmaking fulfills a boys-will-be-boys tautology. (Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby was last year’s female version.)
Funny Pages reaches the peak of pathos when Miles queries Wallace, an immature adult, always paranoid but with hidden talent and his own ideas about art. Miles asks, “Isn’t imagination more important than craft? Is form more important than soul?”
Those questions hang in the fetid New Jersey air. Kline and the Safdies should put that inquiry to Todd Solondz or Zack Snyder, artists truly concerned with imagination, craft, form, and soul, rather than continuing to pursue the self-amusing deceptions of ugly realism — which is the “smart” kid’s alternative to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Funny Pages achieves ghastly humor, but it’s a hipster’s means of America-hating subversion.
