"It's Kind of a Funny Story" Is Kind of Awful

“It’s Kind of a Funny Story” is the latest feature from the writer/director team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, adapted from Ned Vizzini's 2006 novel. It’s hard to believe this is the same team that brought us the indie darling “Half Nelson” for under a million in 2006. “Funny Story” has a reported budget over 10 times greater and manages to do less than half as much.

And what it does do is nothing to celebrate. It seems that for a crack at a bigger market, the filmmakers have given up on taking risks. The result is trite if not offensive. Keir Gilchrist stars as a New York City prep-school kid who cracks under pressure and checks himself into a hospital psychiatric ward. Comedian Zach Galifianakis plays his friend and fellow patient. Don’t let the trailer fool you, this isn’t a comedy. It’s yet another vomit-inducing story about how being white is hard.

There’s no tension and barely any plot. Everything taking place in the present is meandering and meaningless—doubly so as Craig first lives an experience and then talks about it to his therapist. With as much time as they devote to voice-over and backstory, they might as well have just set the film a year earlier. The entire film is built on the ridiculous premise that the suicidal teens are getting therapy with old schizophrenics because the youth ward is under renovation. That sounds more like the set-up for a comedy sketch than a feature film. 

It seems like the actors dictated the plot, and not the other way around. You can imagine a meeting at MTV Films where the producers demand a role for golden boy Zach Galifianakis. They probably didn’t call co-star and love interest Emma Roberts by name, instead referring to her character as the eye-candy or pretty face. This is nothing against Roberts—who is absolutely gorgeous as Noelle—but if she wants to be taken seriously, she had better look for more meaningful parts.

Zach Galifianakis is supposed to be the comic relief, and somehow also the emotional core. But all we get is the same old routine he’s worked out in his stand-up and on the internet. It’s a lot of yelling, and shades of sarcasm until you can’t tell what’s real. Originally this was Galifianakis’ way of parodying himself and the act of performance, but now he’s using the same techniques for conventional acting, and it doesn’t work. The only things new to his performance are the camera angles.

Far more to blame than the actors for the characters’ shortcomings is the horrendous writing. It’s not Jeremy Davies’ fault that his character Smitty has no proper introduction, instilling an awkward feeling in the audience whenever he enters the frame. But as the film progresses and some things start to click into place, there’s something to be said for the incomprehensible first act. The characters keep re-hashing the same conversations over and over. Inexcusably, they don’t even waste our time with original material. They go on and on with hackneyed celebrity quotes and unselfconscious new age drivel. In the famous words of Samuel Clemens, “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid, than to open it and remove all doubt.” That probably doesn’t work when you charge admission.

Independent movies need to find new and interesting angles for telling stories to survive. When they are homogenized like this film, they become a mere shadow of Hollywood and hardly worth the time of those involved, much less the audience’s. I give it 1/5 stars.

Check out my Q n A with Zach Galifianakis, Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck and Keir Gilchrist.