“Are you friends with the tranny?”
What’s it all about? After thinking about jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, Craig Gilner, a sixteen-year-old student at the prominent Executive Pre-Professional High School in New York City, admits himself into the nearby hospital for help. IT’S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY also stars Zach Galifianakis, Emma Roberts, and Viola Davis.
Though I enjoyed Keir Gilchrist in what I have seen of THE UNITED STATES OF TARA, I found Gilchrist’s character Craig Gilner unlikable, a problem not on the shoulders of the actor but rather the script itself. Chris is a withdrawn teenager who suffers from bouts of inadequacy, is jealous of his genius best friend who is dating the girl he likes, and is unsure about his future, questioning whether he really wants to attend a prestigious summer school. IT’S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY is narrated by Chris, and he often depicts himself in ideal terms, where he is the victim of circumstances. If you look at the film bluntly, however, Chris is just a regular teenager who checks himself into a hospital’s psychiatric floor as a bid for attention from his father. When surrounded by people who are actually ill, Chris is overwhelmed by the situation. Thus, only minutes after Chris convinces the doctors and his parents that he should be in the hospital, he asks his parents to go home because he has school tomorrow. His mother believes that he should stay, and he does, however, reluctantly at first.
The rest of IT’S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY plays out like a fantasy. In the hospital, Chris befriends a cute girl (who has attempted suicide), makes out with his best friend’s girlfriend, gets a man who has not left his bed in weeks to sing and dance to Indian music in the rec room, and somehow cures himself of his own depression within five days. The psychiatric floor also has a rock concert and a pizza party. I don’t know if it was the unrealistic, patronizing approach to mental disorders or the protagonist’s teenaged presumption, but I disliked IT’S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY immensely. If it weren’t for the surprisingly affecting and realistic performances by Zach Galifinakis and Emma Roberts, I would have ejected the DVD after the first thirty minutes.
Also, casting Jeremy Davies (Daniel Faraday from LOST) and not having him as a schizophrenic was a missed opportunity on the part of the casting director. You have a whole cast of actors playing patients of a mental hospital, and Davies is a doctor, one of the half-dozen mentally-stable characters? That doesn’t seem right.
Notes: Directed by Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck; Produced by Kevin Misher, Ben Browning; Written by Anna Boden; Ryan Fleck, Ned Vizzini; Starring Keir Gilchrist, Zach Galifianakis, Emma Roberts, Viola Davis; Music by Broken Social Scene; Cinematography by Andrij Parekh; Editing by Anna Boden.
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I’m such a big fan of Boden and Fleck but I couldn’t make it past the hour mark on this. I don’t know what the hell they were thinking with this film; HALF-NELSON and, to a lesser extent, SUGAR had such depth and originality, and it seemed as if they were consciously rescuing pat, even offensively staid genres. (HALF-NELSON completely undermined the “bourgeois white saving/educating poor blacks” trope and SUGAR dug into both sports movies and immigrant tales.) But this…gah. I do feel I should revisit it, if just to finish the thing out of respect for past achievements, but I was REALLY let down by this.