There were sexier films (99 Moons), sadder films (Close, How To Save A Dead Friend), and freakier films (Crimes of the Future) screening at Cannes this year, but nothing at the festival was funnier than Owen Kline’s dynamite deadbeat comedy, Funny Pages.
Ruben Ostlund’s hilarious Palme d’Or winner, Triangle of Sadness, to be fair, was a very close second.
Triangle revels in the spectacle of vomiting billionaires on a cruise ship; Funny Pages is far more Generation X and underground in its sensibility.
“I feel like people always try to make their characters sound super smart or something,” says Kline. “I feel like the laughs you get watching Errol Morris’s Vernon, Florida are far better than trying to be smart. It’s a documentary about a weird world. [The citizens of Vernon, Florida became notorious in the late 1970s for cutting off their own limbs for insurance money.] And Morris gets someone talking and then they slowly start to reveal themselves.
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“And they’ll say something weirdly phrased and it’s funny and it’s not a joke. But it’s funnier than a joke. It’s divine. It’s funnier than something on a sitcom. That’s what I wanted to do. The jokes can’t really fall flat because they come from reality.”
One might reasonably expect the son of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates to have spent many formative years on film sets or attending glamorous parties with other show business scions. His mother, however, retired from film in 2001. And the Kline family, he insists, are not at all Hollywood.
“No,” he says. “Thankfully, no. I grew up in New York. Yeah, I went to a couple film sets but they just seemed like gigantic things. And at that time I was only interested in cartooning and reading. I spent my time Xeroxing and shrinking down my little comic strips and putting them between Garfield and Peanuts. I was obsessed with different voices and cartooning styles in the newspapers. How Gary Trudeau draws eyeballs and noses differently than, you know, Charles Schultz. That was my foundation in the arts.”
For most of his youth, Kline was entirely focused on cartoons and illustrations. He worked as an assistant at Anthology Film Archives, interned with musicologists Billy Miller and Miriam Linna, and was a researcher who did a “ton of transcribing” for Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik’s analysis of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strips, How to Read Nancy.
Although he enjoyed watching movies with his dad — Alec Guinness’s showcase The Horse’s Mouth is a noted family favourite — Kline the younger found his own path into film.
He briefly dabbled in his parents’ profession, appearing in 2001′s The Anniversary Party (alongside his father and mother in her final film role) and in The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach semi-autobiographical depiction of dealing with his parents’ divorce. During that production, in which Kline played a 12-year-old kid with a public masturbation habit, the young actor found himself paying close attention to cinematographer Robert Yeoman at work. He would go on to study draughtsmanship and film at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, before making his first short film, Fowl Play, in 2013.
“I knew my dad was going out to make movies,” recalls Kline. “But it wasn’t really until The Squid and the Whale that I could really see how a movie was put together. That was just two weeks of my summer before junior high. I was a small person in this larger, very detailed fabric. You know, Jeff Daniels is wearing Noah’s dad’s jacket playing. That’s the level of neurotic detail that was employed. And that started the gears for my own project. I knew I wanted to make a movie one day that would be an independent movie and have its own customs and exist entirely outside the machine.”
Funny Pages is certainly that. The film, which Kline spent six years crafting, stars Daniel Zolghadri as Robert, a talented teenage cartoonist who worships his inappropriate art teacher. Acting, in part, on the advice of the latter, Robert rejects his bourgeois parents and university in favour of a grotty apartment, arguments at the local comic book store, and a job at a courthouse that brings him into contact with Wallace (Matthew Maher), a colour separator who worked on one of Robert’s favourite comics. It hardly seems to matter that Wallace is a complete sociopath. The worst visit to a pharmacy one could ever imagine ensues. Followed by the worst family Christmas get-together imaginable.
“There was certainly a period when, maybe it was just the hormones, I was kind of demented,” says the affable, not at all demented Kline. “I went through all that stuff a little bit: not wanting to go to college. I wasn’t a good student anyway. I wasn’t even good in my art class because I didn’t treat anything too seriously. This character is very focused, which I’m not. I started writing this movie 10 years ago, and the earliest iterations were this kid who really wanted to embrace being a slob over a snob. That was always sort of the heart of the movie, but then it found other layers. It’s now about his completely misguided ideas of authenticity.”
The film is produced by Josh and Benny Safdie, the directors of Uncut Gems and Good Time. (Kline previously collaborated with the Safdies on their 2010 short, John’s Gone.) Ronald Bronstein, the brothers’ regular screenwriter — and the filmmaker behind the singular Frownland — also produced and advised Kline on how to make the most from his cringe-comedy.
“I cut out the soft stuff because it didn’t work,” says Kline, who produced an early incarnation of Funny Pages as a 2011 comic book story, Robert in the Boiler Room. “There were draughts of this movie that did try to tackle redemption and that felt wrong, narratively.
“Probably the best advice I ever got was from Ronnie Bronstein: if you’re kind of stuck at a story and beats or something that feels generic, then look at the broader picture. And this is very much in keeping with the Safdie methodology. What’s the wrong idea here? What’s the one thing that could make everybody feel bad and guilty enough to do something even worse?”
Funny Pages opens on September 16th
