Funny Face Review: An Impressionistic Rage Against the Capitalist Machine

An elliptical, thoughtful, and sometimes darkly comic vision of a changing New York, writer-director Tim Sutton’s Funny Face takes the cliché of the isolated urban male antihero and turns it on its head. Featuring characters who float through a city seemingly indifferent, if not openly hostile, to their existence, the film is rife with tropes of modern alienation and marked by an undertone of potential violence. But unlike more self-indulgent examples of this style—from Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down to Todd Phillips’s Joker—Funny Face never seems to be setting up strawmen to provide license so that the audience can vicariously thrill to the antihero’s cathartic eruption of rage.

Saul (Cosmo Jarvis) lives with his parents in a ramshackle Brooklyn house. A developer has bought the land on which the home was built and is kicking the family out, and Saul expresses his feeling about this by leaving antagonistic phone messages with the office of the nameless developer (Jonny Lee Miller). Everything about Saul’s existence feels encased in anger and amber. He spends hours sitting on a roof staring at Coney Island and listening to the Knicks lose. Most of the flyers for punk shows that adorn his cell-like room date from prehistoric times. Even Saul’s grandfather (Dan Hedaya) appears unwilling or unable to give up the ghosts of the past. Pressed by Saul’s grandmother (Rhea Perlman) to get rid of some old magazines, he replies in a dignified cadence, “Ramparts is not filth. It’s political. Commentary.”

From the opening close-up of him wearing a mask with a creepy rictus smile, a Knicks game blasting in the background, Saul is presented as a kind of stunted avenger of the old New York. He stalks the streets in a giggling rage while plotting vengeance on the developer. His sidekick during these perambulations around town is a young Muslim woman, Zama (Dela Meskienyar), who chafes against her aunt and uncle’s restrictions, as she prefers going dancing and hanging out at the arcade to sitting at home. After they have a meet-weird in the deli where Saul works and mopes—he stops her from shoplifting while wearing his mask, suggesting a low-rent superhero—she tags along on one of his walks. They’re an odd couple with an unclarified but seemingly substantial age difference and a bond of shared awkwardness.

As he displayed in Memphis and Dark Night, Sutton is a deft cartographer of how environments shape its inhabitants. Funny Face’s montages of pizzerias, chain-link fencing, slapped-together housing, and breeze-ruffled reeds by the ocean serve as visual testament to the urban randomness that Saul feels driven to defend. Hours become days as he and Zama walk and later—after Saul, in a rare moment of spontaneity, relieves a luxury tower’s drunken doorman of some car keys—drive around town. During their time together, Saul and Zama’s shared silences work to soothe each other’s anxieties. Even when Saul explodes in a percussion of long-stifled disappointment, slamming his hand into the car door while raging about the Knicks, the displacement that paved the way for the Barclays Center, and everything he finds disgusting about the new New York (“All the money, all the bullshit luxury, nothing makes sense anymore, somebody has to care”), Zama sticks by his side rather than running fast as she can away from this unraveling vigilante looking for somebody to unleash on.

Those scenes are contrasted with those featuring Miller’s developer, who glides around the city in a chauffeured SUV and roosts in a cold glass-walled Manhattan high-rise where he watches lingerie-clad sex workers writhe before him with a look of bored supervillain disgust. Though shown as part Bruce Wayne, part Donald Trump, he’s not so different from Saul. They’re both ultimately passive creatures who don’t quite know what they want but are contorted with fury over not being able to grasp it. “You never understood this city,” the developer is lectured by his father (Victor Garber), who derides his son’s glitzy and over-leveraged glass-tower development as more money-laundering vapor than real. “We built a city,” the father proclaims in a way that seems both pompous and yet correct.

The film captures New York through beautiful images that aren’t nostalgic or idealized. Awash in rich sunset hues that do a better job of speaking to what’s worth saving about the place than any soliloquy from Saul, Funny Face can make a shot of even the grubbiest block take your breath away. Lucas Gath’s graceful cinematography stands in stark relief to the tensions of the men jittering on opposite sides of the East River, one hating what the city is becoming, the other hating what it was, and both potentially helping to destroy it. In between them is Zama, suggesting a future that is more expansive than either of these men can understand.