Owen Kline’s debut feature, Funny Pages (Directors’ Fortnight), a fine entry into American independent cinema, goes down a cartoonist rabbit hole into utter chaos and destruction.
One of the better debuts and surprises at this year’s festival was presented at the Director’s Fortnight. Shot over five years ago in 2017, Owen Kline’s Funny Pages showcases his chops as an innovative storytelling and filmmaker, something that many actors (co-starred in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale), fail to do. At only 30 years old, Kline’s inspiration is clearly inspired by his idols and producers (Safdie Brothers), yet his ability to keep pushing the boundaries in his absurd cartoonist comedy, Funny Pages.
Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) a high school cartoonist, is your typical slacker nerd focused on his only passion, the art of the cartoon, specifically, subversive underground cartoons. He is amongst the best cartoonist of his colleagues of his age. After a sudden comic-tragedy occurs to his mentor, Katana, his world is flipped upsides realizing that his precious time should only be towards drawing. He drops out of school, rents a shared basement room with 2 other middle aged creepy men in Trenton, New Jersey, and goes between his two jobs: a comic bookstore clerk and an intern for an attorney who helped him out of his mishap with Katana. Between the day-to-day of Robert’s life, the locations and atmosphere Kline presents are quite within the typical trashy America. Grimy apartments with trash with hues of green and brown, the sweaty heat shown on faces, and acne’d faces amongst his acquaintances, Kline, with the help of his cinematographer, Sean Price Williams, present a world set very much within the world of the low-life comic book milieu with his 16mm film and close ups.
Once Robert meets Wallace (Matthew Maher) at his courthouse job who has an open case assaulting his pharmacist, he discovers that he worked at Image Comics, a publisher for comics where Robert might find his foot in the cartoon world. But as Kline advances each storyline in each sequence, he manages to subvert expectations and goes all in on absurdity. Wallace, a man who is adamant and a bit crazy, speaks with a lispy aggressiveness speaking non-sense about how the world is after him. Robert tries to befriend him through both of their artistic backgrounds, and Wallace has no need to do so, until Robert invites him for Christmas at this parent’s home for pancakes (and money). Now besides all this non-sensical storyline, the driving force behind Robert’s descent into a trashy rabbit hole, is his perseverance in becoming an artist. Although his talent is promising, but not the best, this acts as a surreal origin story of Robert’s (and Kline’s) future as a potential artist interestingly told through the form.
With an even more bat-shit crazy Christmas breakfast involving Robert, his parents, Wallace, and Robert’s friend Miles (Miles Emanuel), there is nothing to prepare you for this wild ride. With Kline juggling anarchy and soul within the chaos of this holiday morning, Wallace starts to buy-in in Robert’s talent, but not without Robert’s naivety to ruin the moment between the two causing Wallace to absolutely lose his shit. Meeting each beat, like a thread unraveling the utter chaos of Robert’s life gave way to end the only way it could have for Richard, back with his comics.
Kline gives his viewers a promising debut playing with the form in non-conventional story telling. It is no doubt that Funny Pages is the baby of Scorsese’s After Hours and the Safdie’s Good Time, but what sets him apart was portraying a young artist’s non forgiving grind and struggle. His ability to formulate locations as character pieces providing richer backdrops to this space and time, adds a richness the world he’s creating, especially heightened by Sean Price Williams’ guerilla photography. It’s exciting to see a new independent American filmmaker on the rise, and Owen Kline will be one to look out for.
