2023 | rated R | starring Rachel Sennott | written and directed by Ally Pankiw | 1h 45m | 3 1/2 out of 5 stars |
Making a tight gear shift, we go to Rachel Sennott’s other film of 2023, the atmospheric drama I Used to Be Funny in which Sennott plays Sam Cowell, a stand-up comedian who gives it all up after a traumatic event breaks apart her life and that of the family she served as a nanny for.
I Used to Be Funny is told in something of a puzzle box fashion, flashing back and forth from Sam’s current state of depression to her time before that, as a comedian who regularly tells penis jokes at underground New York clubs. The plot, which comes crashing in from both ends involves Sam taking a job as a nanny to a girl (Olga Petsa) and her immediately creepy widowed father (Jason Jones) to earn some extra money and befriending the girl, and the present day story of depressed Sam doing her best to find the girl, now missing. The movie’s construction allows it’s reality to come into place one puzzle piece at a time, which is undeniably engaging. The true nature of what happened that caused both girls to escape their lives, one mentally and the other physically – gets revealed in the third act and gives one the satisfying sense of solving a mystery.
Except this isn’t a mystery and I’ve gone back and forth in my head over whether this puzzle box narrative style is the best way to tell this story. Imagining it being told linearly is not as satisfying for the audience, so I get the reasoning behind it. Without giving away spoilers the film would have a mini-climax in the middle or before the 2nd act, then we would spend a lot of time with a miserable, depressed character. While that would be bold, it might be a bit too suffocating to drag an audience through to get to the third act. Again, part of me thinks it still might work because the movie has done (and does) such a good job of building the groundwork to make us root for Sam in the first place. The way writer/director Ally Pankiw (Black Mirror: Joan is Awful) structures the film it allows us to spend a lot of time with depressed Sam while giving us trap doors out of it to a trauma that is refashioned into a mystery. You can decide for yourself how appropriate it all is.
I Used to be Funny is an effective tale of depression, telling a distinctly female story from a female perspective. While the inciting incident is a problem unique to women, the ultimate solution is equally so. Despite her refusal to participate in the world, Sam is surrounded by a social safety net of friends who want her to get back on stage and a love-lorn ex-boyfriend who wants to get back together with her. A male version of this story would feature no such safety net and end early with the guy putting a gun in his mouth.
Aside from Sennott’s terrific performance at the center, the movie also works because of how realized and lived-in it feels. It’s moody and atmospheric right up to the ending with every relationship in Sam’s orbit from her friends to the family are fleshed out and feel real. Well, except for her Wacky New York Friends with a capital W. The third act satisfyingly steers into a kidnapping film, which makes for about three sub-genres I Used to be Funny folds into it’s story, all of which it handles with an acute observation to pain, realism and subtle beauty.