Galifianakis and Roberts Help Funny Story Shine
Craig (Keir Gilchrist) feels like he wants to commit suicide. The 16-year-old rides his bike to the hospital absolutely certain in his desire, stressed out of his mind at the pressures being put on him by his parents Lynn (Lauren Graham) and George (Jim Gaffigan) and his prestigious High School. He’s depressed and he knows it, insisting that he be admitted into the psychiatric ward immediately, not realizing that by having himself admitted with such tenacity he’s now stuck their for a week.
Zach Galifianakis and Keir Gilchrist in It's Kind of a Funny Story © Focus Features
Now he finds himself amongst a community he’s fairly certain he shouldn’t be part of. Sure he’s got problems but now that he really gets the chance to see what crazy looks like his mental health problems can’t help but pail in comparison. Yet he still manages to make friends, especially with the easygoing Bobby (Zach Galifianakis) and fellow teenager Noelle (Emma Roberts), and while both are dealing with issues more complex than his own thanks to them he discern the potential answers to his own problems and finds ways to deal with them he maybe never would have discovered otherwise.
Writing and directing husband and wife duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck follow up Half Nelson and the criminally little seen Sugar with an adaptation of Ned Vizzini’s acclaimed novel It’s Kind of a Funny Story offering up a modern day One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next with a decidedly adolescent bent. The movie is another winner for the duo, and although portions of it reek a bit too much of overly familiar cliché thanks to a solid second half it ends up being a picture I can recommend without too many reservations.
Other than an initial dream sequence with Craig inadvertently throwing himself off the Brooklyn Bridge, the opening moments of the film simply do not work very well. Craig’s trip to the Emergency Room is overly eccentrically played and way too silly, while his initial moments inside the hospital’s mental ward is annoying and hackneyed. I wasn’t drawn to the kid at all, and the way his parents are depicted feels like something more out of a Fox sitcom than it does anything else. The institution’s patients come off like they’re straight out of central casting, while Viola Davis (playing the doctor in charge of it all) spouts so many platitudes in so short a time frame someone should call Guinness and see if a record was broken.
But then to sort of paraphrase the title of the movie, a funny thing happens and Boden and Fleck manage to suddenly steer things in a much more pleasurable direction. While nothing unexpected ultimately happens, how Craig gets to his epiphany still manages to be to be quite entertaining to witness. By introducing Bobby and Noelle the story actually engages in conversations that are about something, that have meaning, the picture discovering elegiac truths that are as universal as they are empowering.
I’m not a huge Galifianakis fan, and while his performance here isn’t all that much different than the ones I’ve seen from him in The Hangover or Dinner for Schmucks there was something about the character that kept me continuously intrigued. The filmmakers utilize the actor’s trademark mannerisms in service of the story, not as an idiosyncratic sidetrack, keeping both him and Bobby’s story always in focus and thusly making him an integral part of Craig’s maturation.
Even better is Roberts. This is the first role she’s had with some meat on it, and I like the way she’s able to signify so much about Noelle and her past without having to say much of anything. A shrug of a shoulder here, a raised eyebrow there, her whole performance is about how she moves though an area not how she converses with her peers. I love the way that Bowden and Fleck allow the performance to speak for itself, stripping away dialogue so that the actions can showcase a depth little in the way verbally ever could.
I’m still not sure how I feel about Gaffigan mainly because the bad taste he allowed to form in my mouth during the early scenes never really did dissipate by the time the film was over. There are times I felt like he was going through the motions, the youngster coming perilously close to disassociating himself from the character too much keeping me from getting as close to him as I would have lived to. But he has great chemistry with both Galifianakis and Roberts, and while that doesn’t make up for everything it goes along way to do so all the same.
Is the movie as overall strong as the pair’s previous efforts? No, Bowden and Fleck’s Half Nelson and Sugar overall much stronger efforts than this one is. But by the time it was over I was more than happy with where It’s Kind of a Funny Story had decided to take me, and even though there wasn’t much in the way of originality the entertainment value in Craig’s story was still remarkably high. Galifianakis and Roberts bring things home in a way that kept my spirits high, and as fanciful frolics into the world of mental health go this is one I wouldn’t have to be medicated for in order to watch a second time.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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