Director: Ally Pankiw
Writer: Ally Pankiw
Stars: Rachel Sennott, Olga Petsa, Jason Jones
Synopsis: Sam is a young stand-up comedian and au pair struggling with PTSD, who is weighing whether or not to join the search for Brooke, a missing girl she used to nanny.
If I could offer one recommendation pertaining to Ally Pankiw’s I Used to Be Funny – that is, without that recommendation being the movie itself – it would be to go in completely blind. Judging a book by its cover can lead to interesting returns in most cases, but doing so with a film of this nature makes for an even more curious exercise. I mean, it’s a dramedy starring Rachel Sennott as a stand-up comedian with the word “Funny” in the title. You’d be forgiven if your first instinct is to assume you’re in for a bundle of laughs.
The reality of Pankiw’s debut feature is considerably darker: Indeed, Sennott portrays a stand-up comedian, and the now-trademark glibness that her characters tend to live by does peek through in one-liners aplenty, but I Used to Be Funny offers her an opportunity to utilize the dramatic chops her well-documented Tisch education afforded her back in the early days of her career. Sennott plays Sam, a comedian who supplements her income by working as an au pair for a wealthy family with a troubled daughter, Brooke (Olga Petsa). As the film unfolds on two separate, tonally-dissimilar timelines, we see Sam forming a unique bond with Brooke in one, while in the other, their bond has fractured due to something Sam did. (At least, according to Brooke.)
This relationship-altering event, which involved Brooke’s father (Jason Jones) and is only vaguely referenced until we see it unfold in the film’s final act, has left Sam riddled with PTSD, and has sent Brooke running into the arms of older troublemakers in an effort to avoid her problems. Sam, in the interim, has quit comedy, broken up with her boyfriend (Ennis Esmer), and asked to crash with her comedian pals, Paige and Phillip (Sabrina Jalees and Caleb Hearon, respectively). These living conditions provide a natural comedic undertone to the proceedings, but Sennott’s zingers fly few and far between in comparison to what we’ve come to expect from the Bottoms star. Needless to say, Bottoms this is not; it’s not even Shiva Baby, the indie that launched Sennott to relevance and carried with it a droll, cringey humor, the likes of which I Used to Be Funny doesn’t waste time attempting to replicate.
Of course, that’s because it has different things on its mind. It’s a film that is far more concerned with comedy’s role in grief, how connections can be formed and broken through trauma, and the lengths we will go to to hide from the world that seems to kick us while we’re down. But the more I Used to Be Funny jostles back and forth from one timeline to the next, it becomes scattered, both narratively and tonally. It’s a worn out stylistic approach already, non-linear storytelling, but when a film becomes so reliant on its perks, things go one of two ways. Either the train falls off the tracks entirely, leaving narrative threads strewn about the wilderness waiting for someone to pick them up and piece them back together, or the story’s principle twist – if we must call this film’s primary trauma a “twist” – is depended upon so heavily that we spend over an hour teasing this inevitable-yet-elusive reveal, and said reveal thus lands with an unremarkable thud.
Now, it doesn’t help that I Used to Be Funny telegraphs its most emotional moments through a slew of Phoebe Bridgers needle drops, a cheap (albeit catchy) strategy that causes the film’s opportunities for natural melodrama to go up in smoke. (Not to mention the fact that “I Know the End” – a song with the lyrics “yeah, I guess the end is here” – plays as the credits roll. As if things couldn’t get more on the nose.) Ultimately, this is just a showcase for Sennott, a chance for a well-known comedic actress to dabble in drama. If only the dramatic moments she’s given weren’t so ham-handed, and the comedic ones so brisk.
Then again, at least Pankiw is upfront about why: This might be a movie about a comedian, but it’s about one who used to be funny. And while it wasn’t that long ago when Sam had camera crews in house to film her own special, horrible things can happen fast, thus zapping even the wittiest comic of the ability to laugh at her own pain. What’s a shame is that Sam’s trauma feels dismissed in the moment, not intentionally, but due to the film’s lack of overall focus. As it lobs misdirection at you from every which way, pulling you from one timeline to another, it stunts its own momentum, causing us to have more questions than answers by the time it reaches its abrupt, saccharine conclusion.
Was the film we just watched about a young female comedian attempting to rediscover her voice after it was yanked from her grasp due to the emotional ramifications of a traumatic event? Was it about rebuilding relationships with loved ones while repairing an even more significant relationship, the one with ourselves? Or was it about the complicated dynamic between a cool au pair and the teenage nightmare she looked after before she went missing? Well, yes, to all of the above. All three work as premises, but become too much for one debut to cover. And there’s only so much an audience can do when the movie they’re watching has no idea what story it wants to tell the most.
