Such a Funny Life – Review​

David Guiterrez (Gonzalo Trigueros) really doesn’t have that funny a life. Living in poverty in New York City, he lives in terror of his father, Ralph (Tom Ashton). Introduced smoking crack and ranting about his own appalling childhood and abusive father, Ralph swears that he’ll do better for his own family, that he won’t let his father’s evil influence pervade the family line. Of course, this faint offer of hope is a lie, and as soon as Ralph reappears in the lives of his wife, daughter, and son, he begins to destroy whatever happiness they have, telling himself – and, apparently, convincing himself – that it’s all for a purpose, to teach wife Mariah (Nastasha Strang) to have the strength his own mother didn’t. In the midst of all this misery, young David learns the use of humour as a defence mechanism, as so many other anxious boys. As the film opens – its storytelling done in artsy anachronic order – adult David is about to go on stage to perform a stand-up set in LA.

His set, what little we see of it, is solid and goes down well, but we don’t get long to be happy for David’s success, as we’re soon caught up in a series of flashbacks, some of which themselves contain flashbacks, nested like Russian dolls. It must be said that most of the material in the script is top-notch, with first-time writer-director Oliver Mann demonstrating a natural feel for human cruelties and human frailties. His principal characters show life and depth; their behaviours are frequently destructive, to themselves and to others, yet their senseless acts operate according to an internally self-consistent sort of sense. None of this is spelled out, of course, for the script is too subtle for that; Mann acts simply as an observer. Such fine writing is helped along by sympathetic performances, particularly from Trigueros, Ashton, and Jacques Point du Jour as David’s best friend Robert, heir to the crime empire of a local thug, sensitive yet necessarily hardened to the suffering of others. A special mention should also be made of the actors who handle the earliest flashbacks. Talented child actors aren’t easy to come by.

However, as often seems to be the case in independent productions, there isn’t enough talent to share among the entire cast, and so the majority of single-scene characters come off as amateurish; you can almost see them looking for their marks. It’s hard not to get the feeling that some of these characters and scenes could have been excised entirely; lacking any sort of compelling structure, the film feels like more of a collection of observations than a story. This is peculiar, as the nature of stand-up performance – particularly the intimate, confessional brand that some of David’s sets that we see tend towards – makes it a natural choice to hang a story around. This is something we’ve seen done more successfully in Adrian Shergold’s Funny Cow, from Tony Pitt’s script. In that film, the stand-up sequences drove both story and characterisation; bitter and confrontational, raw and personal but tough and forceful, they were like the boxing in Rocky or Raging Bull, the battle raps in 8 Mile or Bodied. The stand-up scenes here, while intermittently amusing, feel like they’ve been thrown in.

New, untrained writing talents frequently demonstrate a natural feel for character and dialogue, while lacking the experience to know how to craft a structurally satisfying story. Seasoned Hollywood writers are often just the opposite. From the evidence here, Mann has the potential to go on to craft something really satisfying, building on the promise evidenced by this strong début.