Movie Review: 'It's Kind of a Funny Story'

It’s not often that you get to see someone not only check themselves into a psychiatric ward…but beg to be admitted into one. But then again, I doubt you usually come across such a friendly, sociable group of people in the loony bin either. But so goes the plot of IT’S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY. Keir Gilchrist stars as our main character Craig, a depressed teenage boy on the brink of suicide. He’s like a younger, blander, less attractive version of Justin Long…the Justin Long before he was cool and developed a personality. So it’s hard to really care about him, or his asinine reasons for being so depressed. Once admitted into the facility, he realizes that he probably just needed to get back on his meds and increase his number of therapy sessions. But uh oh, once admitted you have to stay a minimum of 5 days. Now if he were in a real place with the mentally unstable, he would probably be running for his life by the end of day one. But of course, since this is the movies, he finds a mentor in Bobby (Zach Galifianakis) and a love interest in the gorgeous, but equally screwed up, Noelle (Emma Roberts). This is Zach Galifianakis like you’ve never seen him before. Of course he still delivers his funniest lines with that serious, no-emotion-on-his-face way of his that everyone has grown to love, but he also proves that he’s more than just the go-to guy to play the fool (even though he does it so well). He’s the only character that really shows any depth at all. Beneath his confident, funny exterior, there’s a man who’s in pain, and he plays it with conviction.

From the very beginning you can tell that this is an indie movie…and I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against indie movies. But they do tend to carry out a certain cliched trend; you know that thing movies love to do where a character starts narrating in a voice over while shots of what he or she is talking about flashes across the screen in a choppy way? Sometimes it works. Here, it doesn’t. It felt like the film was trying too hard to be stylistic, when in reality all it did was add on extra time to a movie that wasn’t the fastest paced in the first place. That’s the problem dramadies like this often run into. It doesn’t quite know what it’s striving to be. It’s not dramatic enough to have the “zings” it needs to be memorable, yet not funny enough to really make you laugh out loud more than once or twice. There is one scene that had the theater cracking up, involving a random, totally-unrelated-to-anything-going-on-in-the-movie musical number, where we get to see Galifianakis decked out like a rock-star, with glitter covering his signature beard (which I am now convinced is the source of all his comedic powers), but other than that, IT’S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY really was just kind of a good movie.

Rating: C+