Director: Hal Hartley
In size and ambition, Henry Fool positions itself as Hal Hartley’s opus – a modern folk tale that borrows a few literary archetypes (the burgeoning author and his mentor, the erudite drifter) and weaves them through a narrative that is concerned with, among other things, the state of art criticism, the growing conservatism in America, and the influence of the internet on modern culture. James Urbaniak, fittingly expressionless throughout much of the picture, plays the disaffected garbage man whose tutelage under the titular derelict embodied by Thomas Jay Ryan leads him to great success. If, in scope, Henry Fool is a far cry away from Hartley’s Trust, he again excels through one-on-one character interactions, a naturalistic visual palette, and a fascination with language and the possibilities of dialogue (one of the picture’s best scenes involves Ryan explaining the difference between there/their/they’re: “They’re the doughnut people.”) Like Martin Donovan, Ryan has impeccable instincts in dealing with Hartley’s blunt, highly-stylized dialogue – his Henry Fool is unspeakably pompous and foul, but Ryan brings so much charisma to the larger-than-life character that resisting his charms proves fruitless. The direction that the film takes in its latter half is not nearly as strong as the earliest moments between Urbaniak and Ryan, and Hartley fails in attempting to bring a sense of vulnerability to the outrageous Henry, but the occasional misfire is compensated for by the strength of the acting.
Director: Hal Hartley
One might have expected that Hal Hartley’s suburban dystopias would have found an audience in the disaffected twenty-somethings of any generation, but unlike fellow American indie pioneers of the 1990s (such as Jim Jarmush), Hartley’s popularity has waned since finding cult success over two decades ago. His distinctly stylized dialogue, in addition to his penchant for complimenting deadpan with the absurd, has perhaps proven too inaccessible to transcend the arthouse crowd, but nonetheless one can’t help but think that Hartley’s dry, postmodern irony is well-met with the cynical, often surreal comedic sensibilities shown by Louis CK’s television series, to name one example. Trust, the New Yorker’s second feature, follows a pair of misfits who attempt to navigate a world driven insane by suburban malaise – she, a pregnant teen (Adrienne Shelley); he, an electronic repairman who carries a grenade with him at all times (Martin Donovan). The destructive potential of the grenade might suggest the necessity of rebuilding from the ground up, but strangely the film doesn’t wallow in such nihilism. Instead, it is a relatively agreeable story about overcoming such miseries – the asexual relationship that the leads find is, as they put it in a sort of mantra, a love based on mutual “trust, admiration, and respect.” That is not to say that Hartley’s vision is in any way precious – his peculiar fondness for using radical melodramatic devices is overpowering: unexpected detours include a threatened rape, an abortion, and a patricide.
For Reel 