Ya Gotta Have Hartley

Film essay, 1/27/99

Henry Fool

(1998, dir. Hal Hartley)

At one time, Hal Hartley seemed the savior of American cinema.

Against an ’80s moviescape of loud special effects, inane violence, and “brat pack” smarminess (more about the latter in a future installment), Hartley’s low-key comedy-dramas (The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men, and the made-for-PBS featurette Surviving Desire) were all talk. Smartly-written talk, executed by attractive, accomplished actors, who were framed in perfectly-composed shots. Talk ascribed to characters who were umpteen degrees smarter and more coherent than most film characters of their socio-economic status or age, whose problems typically involved the need to either maintain or break down the barriers between souls. Talk set in inner-ring Long Island suburbs and N.Y.C. outer-borough neighborhoods which Hartley depicted not as sterile sprawl zones but as painfully-honest-to-God small towns, where everybody knows everybody’s failings and where grudges last lifetimes.

Hartley hasn’t exactly gone soft. If anything, his mid-’90s installments Amateur and Flirt showed he could carefully increase the sex-and-violence aspects of his stories without losing their human cores. But as Amerindie film became an increasingly ossified set of rules and conventions designed to get films shown at Sundance and sold to Miramax, Hartley’s shtick became one of the indie industry’s more-often-imitated formulas. (Take The Brothers McMullen or Trees Lounge. Please.)

With so many literate-loners-with-relationship-troubles-and-questionable-pasts films out there, all Hartley has to separate himself from his imitators are his skills and his storytelling genius. With his most recent entry, Henry Fool, that’s almost enough.

The plot summary, as if plot were really the important thing in a Hartley film: Henry (James Urbaniak) is your basic Hartley antihero, a smooth-talking confidence man whose simple explanations for everything include simple explanations for his own life’s failure. He boasts of being such a stupendous literary author that the world’s simply not ready for his envelope-pushing greatness. He takes in (and is taken in by) Simon Grim (Thomas Jay Ryan), a young-adult garbage man still living with his teen sister (Parker Posey) and unstable mom. Simon writes a book under Henry’s encouragement and tutoring, which is apparently awful but highly marketable. Henry’s own work, however, turns out to be apparently merely awful. Simon becomes a Gen-X literary celebrity (yes, there can be such a thing); while Henry seduces both mom and sis (leading to the former’s suicide and the latter’s shotgun wedding). Henry ends up in the dead-end working-stiff existence to which Simon originally felt resigned.

Much has been made by critics about how the audience never hears either Henry’s or Simon’s writings. It’s not really that novel. You never really saw the art-objects of desire in Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing or Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (or, for that matter, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights). Besides, what counts for Hartley isn’t the characters’ works but everybody’s (including their own) reactions to them.