Funny Ha Ha (2002, USA)

Encouraged by a bout of good press during 2005’s year-end critical roundup, I finally got around to Andrew Bujalski’s directorial debut, Funny Ha Ha. I came away a bit unsure about all the fuss – yes, the film is extremely realistic, generously depicting a certain kind of shiftless post-college lifestyle that rarely rings true on film. But was that really what attracted so many critics? I did a little searching, and found this at the tail end of Scott Foundas’ review for the L.A. Weekly (“Vague Young Things,” June 2, 2005) –

Bujalski takes a sledgehammer to the carefully ordered surfaces and dramatic conventions of narrative cinema, favoring instead an unpredictability in which the crosscurrents of quotidian life collide on the screen in a series of brilliantly alive patterns. This isn’t improvisation, but rather an adroitly achieved randomness — the perfect syntax for a generation-defining work about a generation marked by its very lack of definition.

What? Had it been a while since Foundas had seen a halfway-decent student film? Perhaps I wasn’t paying close enough attention, but the “adroitly achieved randomness” seemed to be not much more than a relatively talented newcomer deciding to dispense with plot and focus on character and tone. As for “generation-defining” . . . while Bujalski is obviously intimate with the life he depicts – full of listless temp workers, twentysomethings behaving as if they’re still undergraduates, romantic mixed messages – I fail to see how he makes this combination greater than the sum of its parts.