A Funny Man

An uncommonly interminable piece of work, A Funny Man charts the life and times of Danish comedian Dirch Passer (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) – with the film following the character through his successful early days as a Vaudeville-like performer through to his efforts at branching out into more dramatic roles. Filmmaker Martin P. Zandvliet opens A Funny Man with a great deal of premise, as the movie boasts a striking pre-credits sequence in which Dirch chats with his young daughter at an outdoor cafe. From there, Zandvliet slowly-but-surely loses his grip on the viewer by offering up a stagnant narrative that never really goes anywhere interesting or compelling. It is, as such, clear that A Funny Man owes its early success entirely to the strength of Kaas’ performance, as the actor becomes this self-loathing figure to a degree that’s often nothing less than astonishing. The far-than-enthralling atmosphere, which is compounded by the prolonged peeks at Dirch’s act (which is nothing short of awful), ultimately becomes more and more problematic as time progresses, as the movie inevitably morphs from a relatively watchable piece of work to an almost unbelievably tedious (and frequently endless) character study. And although there are a few decent sequences sprinkled here and there (eg Dirch’s failed efforts at stepping into the role of Lennie in a production of Of Mice and Men), A Funny Man is, in the final analysis, a consistently misguided endeavor that wears out its welcome long before it reaches its head-scratching finale.

* out of ****