Mark Reviews Movies: FUNNY PAGES

Funny Pages, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 25, 2022

If his parents have anything to say about it, the 17-year-old boy at the center of Funny Pages is about to graduate from high school and then go on to college to study something that'll get him a good job. That's not the plan according to Robert (Daniel Zolghadri), said New Jersey teenager, who wants to become an artist and really just wants to draw funny, lewd cartoons like the independent and underground comic artists he admires.

One of those cartoonists is his art teacher, who gives the kid private lessons in the teacher's tiny apartment. He collects all sorts of demented stuff, from the mainstream likes of Mad magazine to rarer finds like so-called "Tijuana Bibles" (older porno booklets that depicted famous actresses in all sorts of graphically sexual situations).

The teacher (played by Stephen Adly Guirgis) had his chance to draw professionally, and now, he is a teacher, sitting around in a cramped apartment, inspiring this kid, and hailing the virtues of subverting expectations. On this particular meeting, he strips naked for the student to be the subject of a cartoon portrait.

This crosses a line, of course, and realizing that maybe Robert feels that way about the impromptu act of nude modeling, the teacher chases after the kid to make sure nothing's "weird" between them now. That's when writer/director Owen Kline's film, his feature debut, crosses its own sort of line. It kills off the teacher with such shocking suddenness and in such a twisted way (The implement of his death should be an innocent and cheerful thing) that the filmmaker more or less announces that we shouldn't take any expectations for granted.

On the surface of the plot, Kline's film is a coming-of-age story about a teen who decides to rebel against the pre-ordained path of his life, abandon a well-to-do life with his wealthy family, set out on his own, and find the success in an artist's life that he so desperately wants. On the surface of everything and everyone Robert encounters, though, there's a thick layer of grime and sweat and, for some unknowable reason, random slime collected in a random fish tank.

Like Robert's teacher champions before meeting his gruesomely untimely end, this story is all about subverting what we expect. It takes the hopeful optimism of a familiar formula, in which a young person tries to find himself and the means of his ambitions in a bigger world, and injects it with a heavy dose of cold, pathetic reality.

The film's look, achieved by cinematographers Sean Price Williams and Hunter Zimmy, is grainy and washed-out—suggesting less the sunny anticipation of what could be and more the doomed knowledge of a last-known-photograph. Its story is essentially grounded, but the spirit of that tale—filled with eccentric people of varying degrees of oddness and spaces that make us grateful we can't smell things coming from the screen—is in line with those underground comics of the 1960s and '70s. The lead character's name might intentionally or conveniently allude to Robert Crumb, but even if it didn't, the very fiber of the film's sardonic tone, generally soiled appearance, and broadly crude content would make us think of Crumb and his colleagues.

That's clearly the point here, and one doesn't have to like what Robert experiences—or Robert himself, for that matter—to appreciate how well Kline incorporates the essence of his protagonist's main inspirations into this story. That's especially true of this particular story, which amounts to seeing the very idea of taking inspiration from other people, who are just as flawed and sad and pathetic as—if not more so than—yourself, as a bunch of crap.

The story, then, follows a familiar route, if only because it's so ordinary. After breaking into his dead teacher's apartment—an act that leads to a brief and quickly resolved appearance in court—to retrieve some art, Robert drops out of school and moves out of the Princeton-based mansion owned by his attorney father Lewis (Josh Pais) and mother Jennifer (Maria Dizzia). At one point, the kid refers to his family as "middle class," which definitely shows how unaware of the wider world Robert actually is.

In Trenton, he finds a rental space, which is more a squatters' basement in a seemingly empty house occupied by increasingly strange weirdos Barry (Michael Townsend Wright) and Steven (Cleveland Thomas Jr.), and at the courthouse where he the charges for breaking-and-entering were dropped, he gets a job as a secretary for public defender Cheryl (Marcia DeBonis). While working there, he meets Wallace (Matthew Maher), an awkward and generally irritated man who has been charged for assaulting a pharmacist. The man also used to work for a major comic book publication, and that means Robert has found a new mentor to admire.

Mostly, though, this becomes a series of uncomfortable misadventures, as the naïve but deeply insecure Robert (He's obviously jealous when his best friend, played by Miles Emanuel, starts drawing comics in a style similar to his) tries to get by on his own. Along the way, he gets help and advice from people who probably shouldn't be offering it, and as it the teen keeps going, he's also digging himself deeper into a hole of his own making, simply because he dreams of succeeding and trusts the wrong people.

This is a deeply and inherently cynical film, and in that way, too, Kline is mirroring the rebellious counterculture of the art that has inspired both the main character and the film's atmosphere. Funny Pages is a darkly amusing subversion of the coming-of-age tale that shows the cost of following one's dreams and meeting heroes who paid their own price for doing the same.

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