Funny Ha Ha
Funny Ha Ha, indie director Andrew Bujalski’s first feature film, is often credited for facilitating the rise of the “mumblecore” movement in the United States. And like many of the low-budget, low-sakes, character driven movies created in its wake, it isn’t for everybody, and you can pretty much tell what side of the spectrum you’re gonna fall on by the end of the opening scene. Marnie Cadue, adrift at the age of twenty-three in a sea of post-graduate uncertainty, wanders alone into a grungy tattoo parlor. She’s clueless about what kind of design she wants, and because she’s a little drunk, the guy working there won’t help her, so she gives up and leaves. Shot in Boston’s Allson/Brighton neighborhood on grainy 16mm film, the scene is intentionally mundane. There’s no shouting, action or dramatic question to rope the audience in from the get-go. Instead, there’s only unfiltered reality.
Growing up in Newton, several miles west of Boston, Bujalski, as early as six, dreamed of making movies. After high school, he attended Harvard University. There, the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, with its focus on documentary filmmaking techniques, taught him to work with what’s available and focus on a project’s intention above all else. In 1998, Bujalski graduated and spent a year living in Cambridge, teaching a high school film studies class part-time. He then moved to Austin, Texas where he got serious about honing his skills. Inspired by Kate Dollenmayer, his friend and roommate from Harvard, as well as the confusing phase of life he had found himself in, Bujalski put pen to paper and cranked out the first draft of FHH.
Like Dollenmayer, who would play her on-screen avatar Marnie, the rest of the cast and crew consisted of mainly former classmates, roommates and friends of the director. Though he always had the script on hand for himself, Bujalski preferred to utilize a method immortalized in pop culture later by Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, in which the actors were given a basic outline for each scene and told to improvise their performances based on that. There were no assigned marks, minimal lighting equipment and only a few takes to keep expenses down. Bujalski required his actors to rehearse, refusing to start recording until they found the vibe he was looking for. When asked about the experience years later, many of those involved compared the bare-bones production to a party they would’ve attended in college.
If there’s anything about this movie that I can say is an absolute success, it’s Dollenmayer’s performance. Marnie is a painfully relatable character, perfectly embodying the anxiety of early-twenties life. It’s like she's landed after being shot out of a cannon, and for the first time maybe ever, theres no structure in place to guide her to her next destination. So she’s, in her own words, “wandering the earth” in search of identity and purpose. Her friends are no help. Though they try their best to be polite and offer what they can, most are just as lost as she is and Marnie, who’s clearly dealing with mild depression at the very least, can’t help but feel increasingly alone. Dollenmayer conveys her complex emotions with subtly, usually choosing to express herself through her body language instead of her words, since she can rarely find the right ones to get her point across anyway.
Marnie’s ineffectual but persistent attempts to achieve emotional maturity are juxtaposed with her co-worker Mitchell, played by the director, Bujalski. While Marnie’s conversational difficulties can be endearing, Mitchell usually comes off as rude or aggressive. When he asks Marnie out, he makes it sound almost like an obligation, born more of their proximity to each other than mutual attraction. She turns him down of course, but changes her mind after finding out that her crush, Alex (played by OK Cupid co-founder Christian Rudder), has inexplicable eloped. And she keeps him around, despite a clear lack of chemistry or sincere interest on her end, likely because she’s bored and desperate for human connection. It’s as sad as it is authentic, and when paired together in a scene, Dollenmayer and Bujalski create a solid wall of sexual and emotional frustration that’ll have any invested member of the audience squirming in their seat.
When Funny Ha Ha was wildly released in 2005, comparisons were immediately made to the works of popular independent directors from the previous decade, like Linklater or Jarmusch and even older directors like Cassavetes, due to Bujalski’s minimalist approach. I don’t disagree. How could anybody? But similarities aside, I think the key difference between what they did and what he did is exactly what it seems to be. It’s that mumbly, fumbly dialogue that inspired the likes of the Duplass Brothers, Joe Swanberg, Greta Gerwing and Lena Dunham to write the movies that launched their careers. Within Bujalski’s world, there are no cathartic, emotional speeches on the meaning of life to be found. More often than not, the humor is unintentional. There’s no obvious reverence for the setting, nor for the characters on screen, since any one of them could easily get lost in a crowd. All that’s remains is a simulation of life as it was, at that time, in that place, and the humble notation that an average day is only good as you make it.