I have been a fervent Hal Hartley supporter since I saw his short "Surviving Desire" in high school, and even then was still completely unmoored by his searingly brilliant "Henry Fool." But this 10-year-later sequel is not only unnecessary, it's unfortunate.
After a choppy and expeditious start, "Fay Grim" devolves into pseudo-intellectualism, flat out boredom, and finally unwarranted - and unwanted - nihilism. And that's just the plot.
The majority of the new faces are as frivolous and poorly-developed as the movie: one particularly flat character ends up hogging half the time we spend with the infamous Henry Fool himself, and it's their only spoken scenes in the film!
Jeff Goldblum's Agent Fulbright, it seems, is the only bright character (a pun surely intended by Hartley as well). How, then, is he left? **SPOILER** Dead via a car bombing, easily making this one of the gentle-natured Hartley's most bleak films to date, and tonally all wrong in a film that's already mostly wrong from the word go.
As for the other new characters, as well as Angus James, Simon Grim, Ned Fool (or is it Grim?), not to mention Fay herself... well, I won't spoil their fates, as the movie does a good enough job of that all on its own (when it isn't busying itself with yet another canted angle, which gives the disconcerting impression that Hartley is moving backwards from Auteur to Film school student).
This piece is almost a complete disaster, certainly a dreadful mess that sadly isn't good-humored enough to revel in its messiness. Instead it self-indulgently crams the typically fun hipster pretenses of its director into the "real world", one uglier and meaner than it need be, but not nearly ugly or mean enough to come close to codifying any observations that would make it all worth it. Indeed, even by carefully walking through this dirt, Hartley still leaves unwelcome tracks on my memories of these people and the marvelous world he originally created for them.
As much as I admire the effort, I have to be honest when I say I have rarely been so depressed at the movies - and I'm counting "Leaving Las Vegas," which at least developed fresh new characters we grew to love before destroying them, instead of immediately disregarding characters already beloved.
Grim, indeed.
After a choppy and expeditious start, "Fay Grim" devolves into pseudo-intellectualism, flat out boredom, and finally unwarranted - and unwanted - nihilism. And that's just the plot.
The majority of the new faces are as frivolous and poorly-developed as the movie: one particularly flat character ends up hogging half the time we spend with the infamous Henry Fool himself, and it's their only spoken scenes in the film!
Jeff Goldblum's Agent Fulbright, it seems, is the only bright character (a pun surely intended by Hartley as well). How, then, is he left? **SPOILER** Dead via a car bombing, easily making this one of the gentle-natured Hartley's most bleak films to date, and tonally all wrong in a film that's already mostly wrong from the word go.
As for the other new characters, as well as Angus James, Simon Grim, Ned Fool (or is it Grim?), not to mention Fay herself... well, I won't spoil their fates, as the movie does a good enough job of that all on its own (when it isn't busying itself with yet another canted angle, which gives the disconcerting impression that Hartley is moving backwards from Auteur to Film school student).
This piece is almost a complete disaster, certainly a dreadful mess that sadly isn't good-humored enough to revel in its messiness. Instead it self-indulgently crams the typically fun hipster pretenses of its director into the "real world", one uglier and meaner than it need be, but not nearly ugly or mean enough to come close to codifying any observations that would make it all worth it. Indeed, even by carefully walking through this dirt, Hartley still leaves unwelcome tracks on my memories of these people and the marvelous world he originally created for them.
As much as I admire the effort, I have to be honest when I say I have rarely been so depressed at the movies - and I'm counting "Leaving Las Vegas," which at least developed fresh new characters we grew to love before destroying them, instead of immediately disregarding characters already beloved.
Grim, indeed.