“The story of New Jersey’s next great comic book artist and biggest dick” reads the poster for Funny Pages; but indeed everyone who appears in this sardonic, uncomfortable comedy is a dick on some level. Everybody finds some way to be mean or inconsiderate to someone else, from an old woman at a pharmacy shouting inane accusations to an otherwise friendly public defender commissioning an offensive caricature of a co-worker. But most of all the artists are dicks. Dicks over their creativity, methods, and egos, but also just through their stubborn aggravations and denial of responsibility. The movie is set up like, and indeed its’ protagonist probably sees it as, the story of a passionate young artist stumbling upon a legacy veteran in whom he finds a mentor. But as a movie openly dealing so much in subversion, it’s no shock this narrative is turned on its’ head.
The film is the feature debut of Owen Kline, who years ago was the younger child in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale. Baumbach clearly impressed on him, especially in some of the writing, but the style owes more heavily to that of its’ producers and one-time directors of Kline, the Safdie Brothers. The cold atmosphere, uncompromising grimness of tone, and cast of uniquely unappealing characters played naturalistically by non-actors is very much of a type with Uncut Gems -I could see this movie happening just downwind of that one a few hours away (they even share an actor, Mitchell Wenig -one of the twins). This resemblance is very curious given how much signature style in art is emphasized by the movie; multiple characters spouting off about the importance of individual creativity over adherence to form. Kline himself has no need for that, wearing his influence proudly on his sleeve.
Funny Pages, as its’ title would imply, is about comics. Specifically it follows a teenage artist Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) in Trenton, New Jersey who has an affinity for underground comics of the 70s and 80s -his own work very much inspired by Robert Crumb in its’ vulgarity, heightened features, and shock value. After the death of his gross creep of an art teacher, he decides to drop out and gets a job working in a law office where he meets Wallace (Matthew Maher), a man accused of assaulting a pharmacist and who just happens to be a former colour separator at Image Comics. Robert, seeing Wallace as a comics industry professional who could be his new guide, starts obsessing over and inserting himself into the guy’s life.
The movie is shameless and off-putting from the start, opening on several sexually explicit comics from the collection of Robert’s teacher that he is showing to the kid after school. Not long after, he poses nude for him -leaving not much love lost in his subsequent sudden demise. The school is really shabby and dilapidated, as is everywhere that Daniel goes: the legal office, the comic book store and especially the dirty slum apartment that he rents for cheap when choosing to move out of his parents’ home in Princeton, the one locale in the movie that doesn’t seem crawling with cockroaches. The intent in this seems to be to present a grimy, unpleasant aesthetic every bit as underground and transgressive as the comics Robert draws. It also appropriately compliments his attitude, which when not talking about art, is sullen, dismal, and dismissive, which Zolghadri plays with great believable malaise. It’s not a dull or overtly irritating performance though, as it’s too marked by the disorientation of adolescence, especially in an adult world he has no business partaking in.
But it’s Maher who’s the real revelation of the piece. The character actor off of Our Flag Means Death is wonderfully erratic as the abrasive, socially awkward criminal defendant whom Robert impresses role model status onto. He can be the most sensible guy in the room one minute, completely unreasonable or manically unhinged the next. Maher just nails the discomfort of this already pitiable character having some random kid latch onto him, a kid determined to remind him of a career he clearly has few fond memories of. We don’t actually get to know a whole lot about Wallace, but he is clearly saddled with lots of disappointment and regret that it can be surmised exacerbate his mental health issues, and Robert is a direct cause of even more pain and frustration.
And yet this is also a guy who ludicrously tries sneaking back into the pharmacy he was supposedly banned from to pressure Robert into goading the pharmacist into violence –as a way to help his case; who is so embarrassed by his dirty feet that he tries washing them in the shower at Roberts’ parents’ home on Christmas where he also breaks a window for air. It’s a stressful kind of bewildering comedy, and Maher is a perfect fit.
More importantly though, Kline ensures his authority where it counts for Robert, limited though it may be. Threaded throughout is an interesting conversation about originality in art, something Robert seems to value immensely. It’s to the point that he chastises his friend Miles (Miles Emanuel) for a seeming design aesthetic in his own comics that he views as a rip-off. Of course being a teenager it’s pretty clear he just doesn’t like that Miles seems to have copied his interest -his own acolyte as much as he wishes to be Wallace’s. Wallace though worked in a system more designed around skill than creativity, and ultimately has little positive to say about the cartoons that Robert idolizes. His value system around art is completely at odds with Roberts’, and eventually the two do battle, resulting in calamity. But not before Kline uses Wallace to make a point about pretentions in art and the pretentions of youth. “Nobody in this room is an artist”, he says adamantly, referring to himself, Robert, and Miles, and it’s not hard to see he’s just in that assessment. Both these kids think far too highly of themselves and it reaches its zenith when Robert has the audacity to doodle over Wallace’s original comic print.
Originality is overrated, the film seems to say. Artisans are just as important as inspired creatives, maybe more so. Wallace is the first professional in his field whom Robert meets and Robert desperately wants him to be a visionary like he sees himself. He contrives a technical mastery to Wallace’s colour separation that Wallace doesn’t see and probably isn’t there -he was just good and competent at his job, which can be enough. But it isn’t for Robert, whose personality seems shaped around the perceived excellence of his work and ambitions. He’ll have to meditate on that, as he does through the end credits, sombre for such a wild film.
The irony is that Funny Pages is quite original, its’ vivid characters and seedy imagery have a life their own in spite of the potent sources of influence. It’s raw in a sometimes uncomfortable way, innately tense for its’ dark humour -you’re often just waiting for another baffling, off-putting shoe to drop; but it’s smart. And on occasion, even I’m up for artists being taken down a peg.
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