Thursday, June 21, 2007

Fay Grim: Hal Hartley hits the screen with his follow up to Henry Fool


Fay Grim: Hal Hartley hits the screen with his follow up to Henry Fool

Originally published in Venus

When I was fifteen-years-old, I had a huge crush on a older guy who represented everything a wanna-be counter cultural high-school freshman thought was cool — he was tall, had a nose ring, listened to bands I had never heard of and had a deep knowledge of independent cult film. We would send each other long, rambling emails and in one of them he cryptically told me to “go watch some Hal Hartley movies.”

Little did I know, while boy-who-shall-remain-nameless and I were embroiled in our pretentious email fandango, Hartley was hitting it big with his film Henry Fool. Henry Fool tells the story of Simon Grim (James Urbaniak), a garbage man cum Nobel Prize winning poet living in Queens, and Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan), a drunken wind-bag novelist who storms into town and changes everyone’s lives. While living in the Grim basement and writing his epic Confessions, a work which he compares to the works of de Sade or Rousseau, Henry prompts Simon to begin writing, sweeps Simon’s nymphomaniac sister Fay (Parker Posey) off her feet and marries her, sinks into a pit of despair as a result of Simon’s success, and flees the country with great fanfare when his past threatens to catch up with him.

Fay Grim picks up where Henry Fool left off. It’s ten years later — Simon is still in prison for abetting Fool’s escape and Fay is left on her own with a fourteen-year-old son. She tells the world that she’s forgotten about Henry, though Hartley underscores her uneasy devotion to the man every time she utters the heavy-handed, transparent, “I’m single — sort of.” Fay is on the brink of succumbing to the foppish advances of Simon’s smarmy literary agent and moving beyond the shadow of her husband’s legacy when two CIA agents pay a visit. Agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) and Carl Fogg (Leo Fitzpatrick) enlist Fay’s help in finding her missing husband, embroiling her in an international web of intrigue that isn’t that intriguing at all.

It’s not surprising that Hartley’s film is super self-aware or that most of the action in this unexpected political-thriller-comedy is anti-action. He’s an indie-demi god. That’s what those guys and gals do. Hartley’s bete-noire, however, is that he drowns in his own conceits. Fay Grim lacks the empathic character driven drama that made Henry Fool so memorable. Fool was an intense, though at times grating, meditation about the human spirit, the drive to create, and the rampant egotism concealed therein. In this go around Fool’s cast of anti-heroes in are reduced to marionettes enacting a vacant and convoluted spy spoof that forgets to be funny. But, hey, that’s what sequels are known for.

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