Thomas Jay Ryan and Parker Posey.
Director Hal Hartley expands his vision
with Henry
Fool.
Wild card
Hal Hartley's new feature shuffles the deck as it deals out a brand-new hand.
by Richard C.
Walls
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8/12/98
Henry Fool
****
(4 of 5 stars)
Writer-director Hal Hartley's Henry Fool has got to be a
candidate for the most surprising movie of the year.
Hartley, with five feature-length films during the last
decade, had staked out a singular turf with such precision
and doggedness that it seemed likely he would work his
personal patch of expression indefinitely -- even if, as his
last feature, Flirt (1995), indicated, it meant simply
spinning his wheels. None of his past efforts prepare the
viewer for the ambitious and vulgar sprawl of Henry
Fool.
For about the first third of its two-hours-plus running time, Fool seems like a typical Hartley film. It's a highly stylized and detached look at despairing and perplexed individuals, both pointedly grim and comically absurd. Grim, in fact, is our protagonist, Simon Grim (James Urbaniak), a lanky, bespectacled nerd who works as a garbage man in a huge factory of unknown purpose. His sister Fay (the ubiquitous Parker Posey in the role she was born to play) is a train wreck of low self-esteem, a whiney über-slut who serves Simon inedible meals when he comes home from work. Rounding out this happy family is mom (Merritt Nelson), a prescription-drug zombie who floats through the house leaving a trail of disapproval and regret.
One day, while standing in an understandable funk on the sidewalk in front of his house, Simon suddenly senses the imminent arrival of something, gets down on his knees and puts his ear to the ground like an old Indian scout. Here, Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) makes his somewhat mythic entrance. Fool rents a room in the Grim family's basement and quickly becomes both Simon's resident id and superego. A self-styled writer-genius, he's working (he tells Simon) on his magnum opus, his "life's work, my confessions," though he adds, "the details of my exploits are only a pretext for a more expansive consideration of general truths."
If the everyday squalor of Simon's home life probably signaled us that we were in familiar Hartley territory, then the improbable verbosity of Henry Fool clinches it. Like so many of the director's memorable characters, Fool has the curse of gab, a philosophically oriented version of Tourette's Syndrome where the constant flow of words is epigrammatic, confiding and slippery. Fool calls his writing a bomb-in-progress that will "blow a hole this wide in the world's idea of itself." He certainly looks like an artist, scruffy and preoccupied. He definitely talks a good game, a little pompous but with a redeeming hint of ironic weariness. In the context of Hartley's oeuvre, this is a man not to be trusted.
But Simon is transfixed by this expostulating character and soon he himself is inspired to take a stab at writing. The result is an epic, pencil-scrawled poem of several volumes, one which even impresses the self-absorbed Fool. As it is bandied among various characters in the film, it seems capable of facilitating miraculous events (for this film is, of course, a fable).
Hartley goes beyond his usual terrain here with a movement, an expansion, that's two-pronged. One prong is wildly successful, the other problematic. To take the latter first, Hartley is trying to deal with at least one Big Theme here, the role and responsibility (if any) of the artist in society.
Fool has inspired Grim to create something that's much larger than both of them. This unbridled outburst of feeling and observation provokes the usual suspects. First the local school board, then conservative politicians and, finally, in a very droll moment, the pope himself denounce Grim's work as immoral, unhealthy and dangerous. On the other hand, shock feminist Camille Paglia, appearing as herself in a TV soundbite, burbles on about how the poem has "an authentically pungent and squalid element in it that I think is the authentic, trashy voice of American culture." It's difficult to say which of the two warring sides is the more tiresome.
This sort of flat-out satire is new for Hartley and it doesn't quite work, because its points are made too obviously and in a manner out-of-sync with the rest of the piece. What works is when Hartley starts to open up the film emotionally. Previously his characters' untidy lives and hapless predicaments were rendered with an intellectual exactitude. His point of view admitted to chaos and dissatisfaction, but wrapped things up in carefully considered aphorisms and a narrative strategy that, for all its waywardness, resolutely colored within the lines. In Fool, Hartley begins to let some emotion seep through that doesn't seem like it's been filtered through a cautious intelligence. Then, amazingly, he ups the ante until the viewer winces with pained recognition. There have been murders, betrayals and unwise fuckings in other Hartley films, but they were always viewed through the safe end of the telescope. This is different. It's as though a smart and entertaining kid had finally put aside his bag of tricks and decided that life is, despite its nonsensical heart, essentially serious -- that there's a lot more at stake than being just the fastest lip in the room.
Even a well-versed Hartley devotee
could leave a screening of Henry Fool and conclude that this
may be only the beginning of a brilliant career.
Showing exclusively at the
Detroit Film Theatre (inside the DIA, 5200 Woodward),
Friday-Sunday. Call 313-833-2323. A thoroughly comprehensive
Web site about all things Hartley is yours for the surfing
at www.best.com/~drumz/Hartley/
Richard C. Walls writes about film, literature and music for
the Metro Times. E-mail him c/o metrotimes@aminc.com.