Rent Funny Pages (2022)

Weird Comedy With Little Laughs - Funny Pages review by GI

Despite lots of accolades especially on the festival circuit I found this coming of age comedy to be excruciating and dull. It's dark, bizarre and mostly in bad taste to the extent that I couldn't find anything in it at all funny. Talented young graphic artist, Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) who longs to work in comic books shuns his comfortable life with his parents and heads off to squalor and an entourage of misfits on the idea that he has to suffer for his art! This brings him into contact with some truly disgusting people including the weird Miles (Matthew Maher) who he eventually takes home to his parents with disastrous results. As an indie comedy I'm sure this will have fans but it did nothing for me mainly because it dwelt far to hungrily on grotesques and nerds to the detriment of a decent story and script.

Highly skilled and original comedy - Funny Pages review by PD

Owen Kline's very enjoyable debut film is filled with people who look like they stepped right out of the underground comix his teenage protagonist, Robert (the totally convincing Daniel Zolghadri), reveres. There's Miles, Robert’s mild-mannered best friend and a fellow aspiring comic-book artist who has a face like a moonscape of cystic acne, and frizzy, shoulder-length hair that frames him like a pair of old curtains; then there's Barry, an older man with whom Robert briefly shares an apartment, who has the crimson, permanently sweaty features of an old music-hall star who has somehow been transported to the 21st-century Trenton; and most importantly the highly volatile Wallace, the former Image Comics employee Robert hitches up to as a real professional despite Wallace’s protestations. Wallace is the most distinctive of all: superbly played by Matthew Maher, his ovoid head, combined with a constant look of suspicion, is a walking self-satire. With these absurd characters and various agonising situations, the film is often both very funny and beautifully excruciating.

There's an awful lot of underdeveloped ideas, but the basic theme is someone eager to cast off his upper-middle-class existence for the squalor and struggle he sees as essential to artistic legitimacy, and the visual divide between its main character and the people he surrounds himself with serves as a constant reminder of that contrast. The idea of authenticity that so grips him comes from the artists Robert studies, but also from his teacher, Mr. Katano, who opens the film exhorting his mentee to embrace subversion and to skip college, lest it ruin him. Katano clearly oversees a kind of misfit sanctuary in school and in his own home, though he crosses a line in a deliberately weird first scene and suffers the consequences. As with Holden Caulfield, Robert is a moody, troubled teenager channelling his general angst into going off on his own, declaring to the exasperation of his Princeton parents his intentions to drop out of school (although, crucially, he quickly runs back home to them when the going gets rough). Kline’s got a lot of talent, and a readiness to lean into the peevishness of Robert’s naïve rebellion without overdoing it, but while his affection for the oddballs he puts on screen feels genuine, you get the feeling that he regards them as good material rather than real people, and a very contrived, messy final act doesn't help. Nevertheless, a highly skilled and original piece overall, and the very last couple of minutes are very effective.