Cannes Review: Owen Kline’s ‘Funny Pages’

Stephanie Bunbury
·4 min read

Talk about multiverses. In a parallel cosmos that is apparently just around the corner from you right now, a bunch of boys — and grown men — are living a life so different from yours that they might as well be aliens. You can see them in Owen Kline’s Directors’ Fortnight title Funny Pages, hanging out all day in a store that sells old comics, arguing about the finer plot points in the first superhero comics and the originality or otherwise of their own homemade zines.

They’re not an altogether easy watch. The strip lighting in the shop is unforgiving — and you just don’t want to see them eat, although some of them do little else. For these boys, it is seemingly a point of principle to talk with your mouth full. They are only interested in talking to each other, so it doesn’t really matter.

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Young Robert (Daniel Zolghadri), son of professional parents, doesn’t look like the hard-core fanboys — although he probably smells like them — but this is his castle of dreams. George (Andy Milonakis) takes his place in the middle of the store, where he can cuss everyone. Robert’s friend Miles (Miles Emmanuel), whom he treats with contempt and who is clearly in love with him, initiates discussions of comics by asking questions like, “Is form more important than soul?” Everyone understands the importance of, say, early Archie and Jughead. Why go to school, reasons Robert, when he could be here? Why go to college, the only future his parents can countenance for him, when all he wants to do is draw caricatures descended from the heyday of Mad magazine?

It isn’t hard to see why these defiant marginalia would appeal to the Safdie brothers, who were among the producers to jump on Kline’s directorial debut. (Kline, son of Kevin, has hitherto been largely known as an actor in such indie fare as The Squid and the Whale.) It may be set in the suburbs rather than among the Safdies’ beloved urban grifters, but it’s got real grit. When Robert leaves the parental home to rent a room in a filthy basement flat, you can just about smell the mouse dirt.

The flat belongs — possibly — to Barry, a sticky man with a combover and a passion for 1940s B-movies who welcomes him in. He sleeps on the floor next to the bed occupied by Stephen, also “a fan of the funnies,” as he puts it. “Dick Tracy, Blondie, Dennis the Evil Menace with his slingshot!,” he sings out from his reclining position on Barry’s bed. All this is played for comedy, albeit of the saddest kind. Funny Pages is ostensibly making a case for these nerds, geeks and obsessives who are rarely center-stage, but Kline’s approach to his subjects is too wham-bam to let said nerds appear as anything more than pathetic, even repulsive. Like I said, not an easy watch.

At least Robert is presentable. After he is charged with breaking and entering — don’t ask — the motherly duty lawyer who represents him (Marcia DeBonis) and who presumably sees very few presentable people, gives him a job in her office. Here he meets repeat defendant Wallace (Matthew Maher), whose list of assault convictions doesn’t interest Robert half so much as the fact he used to work as a color separator on comics. Convinced he is a genius, Robert befriends him, even asking him home for Christmas. In exchange for pancakes and $300, he has no compunction about stealing from his mother (Maria Dizzia) — Wallace will give Robert a proper, professional lesson in real comic drawing.

It is obvious that puffing, spluttering, paranoid Wallace is crazy and probably crazy violent. It is also obvious — partly because he keeps saying so — that he is not an artist. The fact that Robert attaches himself to him like a limpet is clearly intended as high comic hyperbole, but it doesn’t work that way: all it means is that Kline has saddled himself with a storyline that nobody could believe for a second.

Robert’s father (Josh Pais) tells him he is a spoilt brat. Fair enough, but he’s not a psychotically delusional brat. Would he really beat a man up at Wallace’s behest, let him steal his car, cover for him when he breaks his parents’ windows in the hope of learning more about cross-hatching? How unpleasant this all is, from beginning to end, without being actually funny. This film will find its constituency, for sure. It is made well and with conviction. I’m assured it’s destined to become a cult favorite. The initiates are welcome to it.

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