Funny Pages (2022)
Directed by Owen Kline
My parents, both raised Catholic but no longer practicing, thought it was wise to give their preteen an education in Christianity. I was probably 11, maybe 12, when they would drop me off at St Viator Catholic Church, provide me with two American dollars for donation, and leave me to attend mass by myself. I did this maybe once, before deciding that it was abjectly stupid, and pocketed the money. Along with my allowance, I’d spend the extra currency on comic books.
On the corner of Irving Park and Pulaski sat a closet-sized comic book store. Independence Comics was situated about a block away from Independence Park in the Old Irving Park neighborhood. It possessed the unique quality of maintaining the same level of dimness throughout all hours of the day, with windows that treated a cloudless or overcast afternoon the same. The air was dank and heavy and the owner constantly had an unlit cigar in his mouth. I would go every Wednesday; excited to buy a couple issues and avoid whatever small talk the owner and his coterie of regulars would try to engage me in. Once, while in line, a middle-aged white man casually showed me his handgun. Another time, waiting for a green light on Pulaski, a black woman in her 30s asked what I had in my bag. I showed her my issues of Amazing Spider-Man and Detective Comics and she commented that I looked smart. I thought that was an interesting reaction to something my parents would cite as a waste of money. I don’t really know why I remember that so vividly. The comic shop is no longer there and I don’t know what replaced it, mostly because I don’t go to that part of the city much anymore. But I do wonder what happened to the people there.
The subphylum of humanity that Owen Kline’s Funny Pages observes is specific. It’s what you’d find in any dingy, poorly maintained comic book shop. Most of everyone in this film is overweight and grim-faced and unhappy. It’s not a pleasant aural or visual experience, to be sure, but if accuracy were the metric Kline’s film were to be graded on then I would give it an A+. I was moved by the initial passages of the film, where high school junior Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) is discussing his portfolio with his art teacher, Mr. Katano (Stephen Adly Guirgis). Robert’s work possesses a certain likeness to what you’d see from Edward Crumb; a raunchiness and explicitness that you’d imagine would seem out-of-fashion now. Compounded with Sean Price Williams’ lo-fi cinematography, the look and feel of the film seems more geared to the late 80s than anything modern. But when Robert’s cell phone alarm goes off, I was astonished to be brought to the now. It makes Robert’s act of drawing Mr. Katano in the nude all the more problematic and disturbing. That discomfort spills outside of the art classroom, where the teacher attempts to give Robert a ride home, only to get into a fatal car accident as a result. What we eventually learn is the impact of this teacher’s influence on Robert’s artistic aspirations, and Robert’s futile attempts to cope with the grief of losing a key supporter to his work.
It’s hard not to overlook the producing credits of Josh and Benny Safdie. Funny Pages has the same kind of anxious, go-for-broke energy of earlier Safdie films like Heaven Knows What and Daddy Longlegs. But whereas those films had a distinct urgency to their narrative, Funny Pages’ lackadaisical pacing and low stakes makes observing some of these characters positively cortex-withering. At times these characters seem engineered entirely to be ridiculed. Discomfort is clearly the intended goal for the film, but it broaches on exploitation that I think the Safdies directorial films actively avoid. As Robert disconnects from school and his family, he retreats to a shared basement dwelling in Trenton, New Jersey. The distinctive quality of the space is that its owner keeps the furnace on absurdly high, with Robert and his older roommates observed perpetually in a heavy film of sweat. It’s a gross bit that escalates pointlessly.
Whereas Daniel Zolghadri is a largely ineffectual presence, I was amused with character-actor Matthew Maher’s work as Wallace, a deranged, former colorist for Image Comics. Having seen him in dozens of tiny roles in other films, his off-kilter, combustible energy is used to maximum effect here, serving as an end-point to Robert’s litany of toxic male role-model surrogates. Unfortunately, his role serves to underscore Kline’s banal thesis on artistry as an act of craft versus heart. The final climatic scene is an all too obvious attempt to reconcile the loose threads of this thought, an idea that was best left unresolved. For a film that examines stagnation and drift as a permanent aspect within some, Kline commendably refuses to give Robert a distinct sense of hope. But I think the difficulty I have with the film is that Robert is not an interesting enough presence to care about what happens to him after the credits roll.