The film perfectly captures the uniquely soul-crushing experience of office temping, and Bujalski proves a magnetic screen presence as Marnie's endearingly awkward colleague and admirer Mitchell. Showing utter disregard for movie dialogue conventions, the characters self-consciously stutter their way through everyday encounters, desperate to avoid offending one another, yet lacking the poise and social skills to successfully mask their true fears and desires.
Bujalski's a director of the face and, above all, the voice (he's stated in interviews that he comes up with ideas for recording the sound before he comes up with images); you can't imagine him filming just a hand, or a figure from behind. It's a simple and a complex approach.
Low budget and intimate, perhaps to the point of belonging on the small screen rather than the cinema, its still an intelligent and unpretentious slice of life true American life.
The film's pleasures – and there are many – are similar to those enjoyed during a night in a bar with friends when the conversation flutters naturally between the mundane, the fascinating, the hilarious and the sad.
...The whole hesitant, no-eye-contact school of art just makes me squirm. So thinking that something as milquetoast as Funny Ha Ha's unconvincing flirtations will be one of the opening shots fired by my peers as they overtake the film world is just beyond depressing.
As promising as Bujalski clearly is as a filmmaker, "Funny Ha Ha" would be a nonstarter without Dollenmayer... With Marnie, Dollenmayer has managed to transform a sad sack into an indie screen goddess.
Funny Ha Ha feels exactly like what quarter-century malaise actually is. There is no sermonizing about youthful alienation or the value of friendship and intentional community. There is no cutesiness, no pop-culture nostalgia, no round-tabling about the Meaning of It All. Funny Ha Ha is often offhandedly funny, and Bujalski has a knack for letting scenes build and then cutting out abruptly, duplicating the flow of a life in flux.
It is a small, plain movie, shot in 16 millimeter in dull locations around Boston; but also, like its passive, quizzical heroine, it is unexpectedly seductive, and even, in its own stubborn, hesitant way, beautiful.
A movie full of goofy-cute people conducting profoundly casual and casually profound conversations littered with dangling sentences and pockets of dead air, it's seemingly designed to elicit a collective c'est moi from twentysomething hipster enclaves across the country. But Bujalski doesn't just reproduce the halting, roundabout patterns of actual talk—he has a keen ear for the defensive and passive-aggressive uses of inarticulate speech.
Floating, indecision, the indefinite: This is the gray arena of Funny Ha Ha. The surprise is how the movie comes together and gets under your skin before you even know why you should give a damn.