The most that anybody knows about Owen Kline, whose debut movie as a director premiered in Cannes yesterday, is that he is the son of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, and that he starred in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale as a child—so it is fitting that Funny Pages features a character trying to break away from his parents’ influence, and contains a grimly hilarious masturbation scene. Kline’s film, an A24 joint produced by the Safdies, is assured and funny, an almost bewilderingly throwback indie film whose wit and lack of starriness are beguiling.
Funny Pages—an appropriately flat title for this downbeat comedy of manners—is the story of a young man, Robert), who works in a comic-book store and dreams of a career working as a cartoonist. Against the wish of his well-to-do parents that he go to college, Robert starts working as a clerk in a crummy legal office, rents a squalid shared apartment with two sweaty old bozos in a down-at-heel neighborhood, and focuses on his drawing. Over the course of his typist work, the teenager comes into contact with Wallace—essentially Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons—a weird and aggressive, possibly mentally impaired man who used to work as a colorist for a cult comic. The fitful, absurd relationship between the two, which doesn’t follow the course you might expect, forms the bulk of the movie.
For his first film, Kline has chosen a stubbornly unusual course—not unlike his main character, who rejects the clear path that has been set for him. The characters here, filmed at pore-seizing distance by cinematographer Sean Price Williams on a grainy print, are so many misfits and outcasts; it feels remarkable for an American film in 2022 that nobody here is stunning, and several people are what would be considered ugly. The spirit of Robert Crumb looms large in this film where Kline takes great pleasure in his characters’ unruly hair, bulging eyes, big tits, and bad skin: one scene in which Robert sketches a loving cartoon of his lawyer as a thank you for her work, all flesh and frizzy hair, feels like a simulacrum of Kline’s process here. The characters outlined in this film also have an appropriately cartoonish quality, in the vein of American Splendor perhaps: these people are types, and consequently are afforded the right not to behave according to conventional psychology in Kline’s smart screenplay which is often riotously funny.
The humor on display here—because Funny Pages is a comedy—is impish and then suddenly baroquely overt. Kline wrings a lot of belly laughs from the character of Wallace, whose paranoia and plain-speaking rub up hilariously against the pompous idealism of our young protagonist. In one scene, Robert and a comics-loving pal question Wallace about his former work in comic books, speaking about their own influences in a bid to get him to open up, leading him to cry out in exasperation: “Duck Tales was intended for 10-year-olds in the 1950s! The only people reading that now are perverts and pedophiles!” Wallace has no understanding of the modern world, of the cultural revisionism that Robert and his peers have embarked on in the last few years. Similarly, Kline mines the divisions between Robert and his parents for a painful kind of hilarity—as in a scene when Robert returns home only on Christmas Day to see his parents, whom he otherwise treats with cruel contempt, leading his mother to snap: “Did you come back to get your presents?” and Robert to reply, “I came back for the pancakes.”
Daniel Zolghadri and Matthew Maher give fine performances as the mismatched Robert and Wallace— Zolghadri by turns terse and tentative, showing somebody finding himself as he goes along, and Maher portraying Wallace in seething silence and bursts of weltschmerz. There is a particularly fine, hilarious set piece wherein Wallace tries to enlist Robert’s help in a petty feud he has with a local pharmacist, which shows their dynamic beautifully: Robert somehow idolizing this nightmare of a man, and Wallace being wholly wrapped up in his own bizarre little life, leading to a disaster involving a plastic toy horse. The comedy here is by turns lambent and rococo, prefiguring a fine finale in which Robert invites Wallace over to his parents’ home for Christmas, which goes about as well as you might expect.
At times, Kline slightly loses control of his characters (there is a little too much recourse to shouting in the final stretch, as the director amps up the comedy of manners) and it must be said that Funny Pages is, in the end—and willingly so—a very slight object. But the course that the young director has set for himself, and the shrewd way in which he paints his ragtag bunch of outsiders, display remarkable promise.
