Review of Fay Grim (2007) by Jonathan G — 13 Feb 2010

Henry Fool was everything you'd expect in a good Hal Hartley film: stylized, eccentric performances; some absurd and tragi-comic scenes layered right through, with a central theme told through a cast of amiable and sympathetic characters, superadded to a central performance which carried it through some terribly dark places to an almost iconic final scene.

Fay Grim on the other hand is Hal Hartley at his worst: a weak performance from Parker Posey (which is surprising since she was so good in the first film), and a series of scenes which barely hold together as more than cheap lampoons of spy thrillers, an avenue already exhausted by David Lynch.

There are some flashes that remind us of just how good Hartley can be - there's a nice running gag about a cipher Henry has sent inside an obscene camera which a priest, a rabbi and an imam are forced to decipher; and there's a strong scene between Henry and his captor towards the end - otherwise, Jeff Goldblum notwithstanding, this is a film I wish he'd never made, because it resolves ambiguities Henry Fool deliberately left unresolved, and lends Fool a grandeur which the first film took away to good purpose.

Genre is a good thing, but Hartley should probably start thinking rather more about ideas and emotion and rather less about how to jerry-rig a skeleton of genre around them.