Fay Grim (2007)

Ostensibly a sequel to the 1997 semi-serious black comedy "Henry Fool" (a "10" in my book), the first twenty minutes had me thinking it was just a horrible screen writing, bad-acting and terrible cinematography job. For one thing, the frame in every scene - and I mean EVERY scene - is "Dutch- (Deutsch)-tilted". There isn't a level shot in the entire movie.When I involuntarily started to guffaw, I realized that this was the intent. I restarted the DVD, and viewed it with entirely different eyes, ears and attitude. This film is a laugh-a-minute farce. Jeff Goldblum (not a player in the original Henry Fool cast) is a fabulous deadpan farceur contributing mightily to the general insouciance.Parker Posey displays a delightful and heretofore unknown penchant for comedy - comic timing, facial expression, and body-language - closely akin to Sandra Bullock's.Highly recommended!

At first, Fay Grim seems like it's going to be a return to form for Hartley. This sequel to what, as of this writing, is his last good movie, Henry Fool, starts in an interesting fashion, showing the fallout from the previous film's end. The movie has the spare dialog, quirky performances and low key wit that distinguishes Hartley's best films.I kind of like the idea of the sequel, which turns our perception of Henry upside down. The fact that Hartley has decided to create his sequel as an entirely different genre from the original is really pretty clever.Unfortunately, Hartley is an uncomfortable genre director, as he proved in his odd "monster movie" No Such Thing. His take on the spy film is, like that movie, not much fun. The strange, disconnected dialog that works well when portraying people trying to cover up their emotional scars seems out of place in a movie in which people have to convey important information. There is more than one way to make a spy movie - look at Ian Fleming versus John Le Carre - but you can't do things in such a way that the audience is not only perplexed about what's going on, but even perplexed as to how the film's characters know what's going on. The story is so convoluted it could be considered a spy film parody if it were actually clever or wacky, but instead it just feels like Hartley doesn't understand the mechanics of a genre movie well enough to either make or satirize one.Also, while I generally really like Parker Posey, I did not care for her performance in this; she seemed far too dumb in affect to play the role of the heroine. Thomas Jay Ryan, on the other hand, comes off the best in the film, and feels like a breath of fresh air when he appears. But he cannot save this film, and at this point I've begun to believe that no one can save Hartley from making bad, self indulgent, poorly conceived movies.

Generically speaking, Fay Grim is a highly entertaining thriller featuring two of the most inexorably enjoyable names in American movies, unshakably beautiful and gracefully spunky Parker Posey and endlessly charismatic and unavoidably hilarious Jeff Goldblum. They have many scenes in the first half of the film in which we see these two insatiable presences volleying off of each other, even radiating with charm when Goldblum rolls off Hartley's shamelessly epic info-dumps. Nevertheless, if one were to deconstruct Fay Grim, one would see many instances in which countless scenes could've been squeezed for much more benefit than they have resulted in being.This sort of filmed in-joke is the sequel to Hal Hartley's Henry Fool, which was made ten years earlier. It has title character Posey forced by CIA agent Goldblum to track down the notebooks that were the precious possessions of her missing fugitive husband, the predecessor's titular anti-hero. Available within them is information that could concede the safety of the United States. Fay first makes for Paris to get a hold of them but becomes engulfed in a bona fide celebration of espionage clichés featuring everything from car bombs to ambiguous helpers to Following the Girl to double-crosses to triple-crosses.The primary appeal of it all for me is that it's such a novel approach to the sequel of a movie about a garbageman and a struggling novelist in a small town. In the original Henry Fool, Posey played a simple woman leading a very simple life. Hartley's talents do not reach the heights of many of the other independent newbies from the 1990s, but I do admire his wild creativity in making an inadvertent Nearne sister out of her, giving her a terrific predicament, as he did to her character's brother, played by James Urbaniak, in Henry Fool, as she is trapped between whether or not she may still love her overwhelming refugee husband and the problematic but forceful plans of Goldblum.Hartley, however, is simply riding on that fragmentary idea. His plot, though complex and labyrinthine, true to the form of the spy film, it seems as if to be entirely capricious. The reason I was not bored was mostly due to the pace at which the story unfolds, not to mention the presence of Posey and Goldblum. The problem with the remainder of Hartley's cast is that I cannot seem to become fond of the rest of them. It has nothing to do with how obscure they are compared to the relative star power of the two said charm masters, but with how they don't seem to hold their own alongside them, though Saffron Burrows certainly comes close. Most of the scenes not involving Posey or Goldblum are far too light on their feet, stringing us along with info-dumps we have no choice but to listen to or else be totally lost in the ensuing sequence of scenes. They are shot almost entirely in tiled angles, as if Hartley is compensating for that implacable feeling of a lack of material.Liam Aiken, however, playing the now teenage son of Fay and Henry, has a certain allure about him, seeming wise beyond his years, certainly much wiser than any of the adult characters. Perhaps Hartley intended that, or maybe it's simply Aiken's presence. The problem with a Hartley film is that you never quite know what was intended and what just happens to be there. As Scorsese said, "Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out." One has to be able to trust that what we see is a conscious decision by the filmmaker to remain in the finished film.

I've read a lot of comments about the film and how it's so hard for people to believe that it is a sequel to Henry Fool, and even though it technically is, I think that Fay Grim needs to be looked at as an entirely different film. Just because it is the sequel doesn't mean that it has to be a direct continuation of the first, and I enjoyed that so much about it. The whole point of the film was to change direction from the first, which makes sense because the movie isn't called Henry Fool 2, it's Fay Grim. All that aside, the film, I thought, was so well made and thought out that it actually surprised me. I was expecting to rent another nearly-released-straight-to-video film and have to endure 2 hours of bad editing and an almost hard to follow story-line (aka parker's last direct to video feature the Oh in Ohio) but this was so surprisingly well focused that it almost doesn't seem so, which I absolutely loved. There are so many nuances in the film making and writing that I crave to see in films, but never do. The cinematography was brilliant due to it's simplicity and truly making the film seem 'Grim' throughout - in terms of setting. The writing was so well put together as well, whoever said this movie isn't as witty as Henry Fool needs to watch again and actually listen; I almost can't even begin to explain how actually hilarious it was, and pertinent. And well, Parker Posey, who could complain? The scene in which Fool and Jalal were talking in the dark was so captivating and emotional. And I thought the spy-ness throughout the film was just so hilarious and spot on (in hindsight because i do agree that at times during you kind of felt lost). The main thing that struck me so powerfully about the film, and i believe the point of the film, was Parker's love and naivety about Fool, which was so endearing and turned, yes very quickly, from denial to outright passion. The last five minutes of the film were perfect. Obviously there were things that weren't excellent, but nothing is perfect; some of the acting was poor, and at times I did think that some of the new back story and dialogue about terrorism got a little hard to follow and out of hand, but in the end you got it and didn't even mind that at the time it may have slipped from your comprehension. (This may also have to do with Goldblum's tendency to talk extremely fast) On the whole I would say that it was probably one of the best films I've seen this year; stylistically pleasing, clever and witty writing, performances that were so impressive I now have gained new respect for some of the actors, and a truly touching film, and don't forget, a complete departure from Fool. Which was the point.