I've had Funny Ha Ha in my Kanopy queue for ages, saving it to theoretically watch with my wife, though she barely watches movies anymore. Also, the reason I had been saving it proved to be flawed. It was meant to be a delayed homage to Lynn Shelton, who died in 2020. Only, Lynn Shelton didn't actually direct Funny Ha Ha.
That was Andrew Bujalski, as I discovered only after I'd started the movie, having decided it was no longer worth trying to pin down my wife to honor Shelton two years after her death. And not because I recognized Bujalski in the movie, but rather, because I just decided to randomly check IMDB, since the movie was not holding my attention as much as it should have. It turns out the two Shelton movies I/we haven't seen are We Go Way Back and My Effortless Brilliance.
The confusion arose from the fact that both Bujalski and Shelton are considered to be some of the progenitors of mumblecore, Bujalski himself informally considered the grandfather of the form. Shelton might make a good grandmother, since there's no other female director I think of when considering mumblecore. Those terms tend to overstate how old these two are/were, though. While Shelton was only 54 when she died, Bujalski is still only 44 today.
Funny Ha Ha, I discovered, is informally considered the first mumblecore movie, making the sobriquet appropriate for Bujalski. Given that I've seen a decent amount of mumblecore over the years -- and loved some of it -- that was probably a more urgent need to watch it than to mistakenly honor the director of one of my favorites of the form (Humpday), not to mention my #2 of 2012, Your Sister's Sister, which is more like mumblecore adjacent.
Well, I'd say that mumblecore had not yet found its footing in 2002, except the definition of mumblecore is that it does not have any footing to find. Plot is virtually unimportant in quintessential mumblecore, and core components of cinema like acting, editing and camera techniques are intentionally amateurish.
Or rather, I should call them what they really are: extremely naturalistic. Actors in mumblecore movies should not be considered untalented, even though they are frequently not professionals. (Greta Gerwig and the Duplass brothers went on to big things from mumblecore origins.) Really, what it is about them is that they are very effective at conveying the speech rhythms and behaviors of real people, since many if not most (if not all) of the scenes are improvised, and they are exceptionally skilled at behaving like themselves.
Which sometimes is pretty boring.
It can be delightfully boring, but it is still boring.
Funny Ha Ha is a good encapsulation of that. The characters felt instantly familiar to me -- I was only a few years older than they would have been in 2002, and I was in a social setting that felt eerily familiar to the one they were in. It was Los Angeles not Boston -- though I grew up in Boston -- but the dynamics were very similar. Lots of members of both genders around, lots of people secretly inquiring who liked who and "accidentally" divulging that to the other party. In fact, the relationship I started in 2002, which lasted for 18 months, was "brokered" by a proxy in the sense that I asked a mutual friend whether I had a good expectation of being successful when I asked this person out. The positive response helped me screw up my courage to do so.
But I don't know if that's the good makings for a movie.
From where I sit in 2022 watching this movie, whether someone "liked" someone or "liked liked" them seems about the lowest stakes you could possibly imagine. Apparently 9/11 was not reason enough to pursue more serious themes, though Bujalski probably had this in the works before then. And wouldn't have made a 9/11 movie anyway.
What I really noticed was how awkward these people were. They stammered within their stammers. It's all true to life, of course -- no one speaks in perfect sentences like they do in scripts of mainstream movies, and that would be one of the main instigators of Bujalski creating mumblecore, if it could even be said that he set out to create a genre or would accept that term as applying to his work. (Mumblecore filmmakers like the term "mumblecore" about as much as emo bands like the term "emo.")
The point is that this is all so very everyday, but maybe that sort of thing feels all the more archaic from a distance of 20 years. There are still very independent DIY films out there, of course -- this one has handwritten credits, for Christ's sake -- but mumblecore in its original form has been sort of wiped from the landscape. That could just be because the flagbearers of its original essence -- the Gerwigs and the Duplasses -- have recognized the ceiling of the form and taken their talents to more mainstream work. Or it could be because movies unselfconsciously about so very little just don't have a place in today's cinematic landscape, for social or political reasons. (I should say, it is also very likely a factor that films starring exclusively white people -- which mumblecore films basically are -- are not really welcome today, and with good reason.)
I'm glad to have seen Bujalski's film, and recognized its influence on future films, but how much did I like it? Really, it's again an example of exactly the sort of film I would have given the marginal pass of three stars in the past just for its historical significance, but would have secretly felt deserved 2.5 stars. Which is what I gave Funny Ha Ha on Letterboxd.
Even Bujalski has moved on to brighter and more mainstream things. His progression has been gradual, with Computer Chess (which I loved) diving deeper into the arthouse while becoming more high concept (it's about sentient computers), then movies like Results and Support the Girls staying independent-minded but featuring known commodities in the acting world. In 2019 he wrote Disney's live action Lady and the Tramp, which is about as mainstream as it gets. (Incidentally, if you want to see a little humor piece I wrote on this blog about Computer Chess, check it out here.)
I didn't see Lady and the Tramp so I don't know if you could see the original Bujalski somewhere in there, either screaming to get out or saying "It's okay, we all grow up."
For the sake of the grandfather of mumblecore, I hope it's the latter.
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