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Funny Ha Ha: It’s, Um, Uh, A Pretty Great Movie
By admin | July 10, 2011
Part of the reason I like the movie Funny Ha Ha so much is because of my personal history with it. I feel toward it that proprietary affection you feel toward movies that seem to pop up out of nowhere and seek you out, especially if you see them alone; it’s as if they’re something you discovered, or perhaps even imagined, yourself.
When I first got cable TV about a year and a half ago (a treat I only permitted myself because I needed it for my new job – in the decade I’d spent as a grad student and then a broke freelancer, cable was a luxury as unthinkable as, say, health insurance), my first thought was, “Finally! I’ll be able to keep up with all the weird indie movies that never open in theaters, or stay up all night watching Bette Davis marathons.” But it soon became clear that, with all the time I had to spend keeping up with TV shows for work, niche movie channels like IFC, Sundance and Turner Classic Movies would fall into a previously unmapped category: TV That’s Not Worth Watching Because I Can’t Write About It. (This is the working-world equivalent of the tragic grad-school literary genre, Books Not Worth Reading Because I’m Not Teaching Them.)
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve flipped regretfully past a truly great movie - Vertigo or City Lights or I Was Born, But…- because I had to rush to keep up with the developments on Jeopardy! (click here and scroll down) or come up with a theory about fat people on reality TV. I’m not complaining – I love my work – but it’s rare that I get to watch cable in the way I thought I would before I had it: as a 24-hour delivery system for good, commercial-free movies. When I do have some downtime, the last thing I want to do is stay in and stare at the same confounded box, so if I have time for only one non-work-related movie a week, I’d rather see it on the big screen.
But I clearly remember one Friday night when, frustrated with this emerging pattern, I decided to just stay in, kick back and watch the first likely-looking film that came along (as long as it hadn’t already started, of course – another impediment to watching movies on TV is that you’re always happening upon them halfway through, which feels to me like finishing another restaurant patron’s dinner.) At the very instant I made this decision, the title of a film just starting on IFC flashed onscreen: Funny Ha Ha. How could anyone between twenty and forty resist that title, harkening back as it does to the junior-high-school distinction between “funny ha ha” (which everyone wanted to be) and “funny strange” (which no one did)? The film’s first scene, of a twentysomething girl named Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer) wandering alone into a tattoo studio and being refused service because she was too drunk, seemed promising. I kept watching for a while, tentatively, thinking, hey, this is pretty good. But because the film’s action seemed to center around Marnie’s unrequited love for an old college friend named Alex (Christian Rudder), I felt a certain guilt for staying tuned at first. Instead of parsing the pinings of inarticulate post-college slackers, shouldn’t I be checking the listings to see if something more substantial was on, like Ivan the Terrible or something? It wasn’t until about twenty minutes in that I admitted to myself that I had been drawn in by this slight, sweet, oddly compelling trifle of a film, and that I planned to watch it straight through to the end.
But then, around halfway through the movie, a third stage kicked in: I realized that the film wasn’t a trifle at all, that its apparent offhandedness was actually the result of considerable narrative mastery. As Marnie continues to stumble through the random events of daily life – she loses her job, temps for a while, then gets a job doing research for a college professor, all the while moping over Alex and fending off the advances of a geeky but good-hearted fellow temp – her rhythm becomes our rhythm. Scenes that at first seem like generational satire (for example, a diner scene in which Marnie and Alex regress to juvenile gross-out gags as a form of flirtation) stick with you afterwards as something larger, and kinder – a portrait of two people trying to connect without quite knowing what they want from each other, and above all, without daring to expose too much of themselves. You want to grab poor dithering Marnie by the shoulders and shout, “Just tell him already!”– until you realize that she has no idea what there is to tell, or who to tell it to.
Andrew Bujalski, the writer and director of Funny Ha Ha (who also plays Mitchell, Marnie’s rejected suitor) has been compared to John Cassavetes, to whom he obviously owes an aesthetic debt. Both directors are interested in the place where our banal, unsatisfying day-to-day social interactions give way to real rage and love and pain. But where Cassavetes’ lost souls are given to grand gestures (having nervous breakdowns over spaghetti breakfasts, say, or bringing home livestock in a taxi), Bujalski’s traffic in the smallest of details. One scene, in which Marnie waits in Alex’s bedroom while he answers the door downstairs, shows her toying with a pair of pliers on his desk, then briefly rifling through some photographs and a pack of birth control pills she finds there. In a lesser movie – in any other movie I can think of, really – she would have been caught in the act of snooping, and the story would have proceeded from there: Alex’s outrage, Marnie’s apology, etc. By making the moment an isolated incident witnessed by nobody but us, Bujalski communicates the character’s loneliness and jealousy – and also gives his audience a sense of complicit intimacy with her subtly transgressive act.
The film’s dialogue feels casual and improvised to the point of consisting mainly of mumbled “ums” and “I don’t know”s; how scripted it actually was, I don’t know, but if the actors are improvising, they’re doing it under the guidance of a director with an unusually coherent vision. Bujalski is interested in the day-to-day texture of this apparently featureless modern world (his sound design, rife with ringing phones, passing cars and clattering plates, is particularly noteworthy.) Kate Dollenmayer’s wonderfully realized Marnie is a certain kind of girl you come across in real life, but almost never in the movies; shambling around in the same pair of ratty maroon cords and a torn T-shirt, she’s bright and lively but somehow unformed, more sure of what she doesn’t like than what she does. Like a Jane Austen heroine, she keeps putting her foot in it, overstepping boundaries, misunderstanding social cues, and generally making a mess of things. Unlike a Jane Austen heroine, she seems destined to keep on doing so long after the story is through.
The one thing I don’t love about Funny Ha Ha is the ending, and by ending I mean the very last five or ten seconds. Not because of what happens or doesn’t, but because I (and the rest of the audience too, judging from the confused murmur in the theater) needed one more moment, an extra beat to make sense of the last scene, which tells us something – I’m not sure what – about where Marnie has come in her relationship with Alex. A movie like this one obviously has to end on an ambiguous note – it can’t, like one cheesy thriller I saw last week, conclude on the image of a military chopper literally riding into the sunset – but it should still end, not just sort of stop.
If I ever meet Andrew Bujalski (whom, unlike Marnie, I would probably swoon over) I’m going to ask him what the end of Funny Ha Ha meant, and I’m not going to let him get away with a Marnie-esque “umm…”