Hartley's 'Grim' no 'Fool'

Sequel lacks original's irresistible madness, runs out of laughs

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published May 18, 2007 at midnight

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Director Hal Hartley joins the parade of summer movies with something we seldom expect from independent directors who've resisted the siren call of Hollywood: a sequel.

With Fay Grim, Hartley continues the saga he began with 1997's Henry Fool, a movie that arrived when Hartley was a hotter item. When Fay Grim played at September's 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, I don't remember it creating much of a stir.

Frankly, I wasn't always sure what to make of Fay Grim. I enjoyed watching Parker Posey play the title character, although I thought she couldn't quite keep up with events in an increasingly plot-heavy movie. I thought some of the scenes - even when they didn't manage to connect - were intelligently written, and I wondered why Hartley had chosen to play a distracting game of seesaw with his camera, tilting images one way and then another as if we needed reminding that a Hartley movie should feel off-kilter.

This time, Hartley builds his movie around Fay Grim, the woman who married Henry Fool, the wild, self-impressed author from the original movie. Many years later, Fay still lives in Queens, New York, with her teenage son (Liam Aiken), who has just been expelled from school. Henry, by now presumed dead, is the boy's father.

Fay's brother, Simon (James Urbaniak), a poet of the avant- garde, has taken up residence in prison as a result of his involvement with Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan) in the first installment.

In the beginning, Posey perfectly embodies every Hartley ambition, playing the role of Fay with a sullen indifference that borders on the sublime. She's funny, and so is Fay Grim - at least in a Hartley sort of way. That means the laughs derive from deep within the movie's deadpan center.

It doesn't take long for the movie to meet its ruin, which arrives in the form of an espionage plot that casts Jeff Goldblum as a CIA agent named Fullbright. Fullbright wants Fay to help locate Henry (yes, he lives) and retrieve lost volumes of Henry's inscrutable "confessions," which (as it turns out) may have some meaning after all. If you saw the first movie, you know that Henry wrote copiously and strangely in composition books of the sort that are still popular in elementary schools. He claimed to be writing the book to end all books.

Some critics have decided that Hartley has tried to make a parody of the international thriller. In pursuit of this aim - if that's really what he had in mind - he takes his film to Paris and later to Turkey. Many will have difficulty determining whether Hartley has held the genre up to ridicule or tried to master it - or maybe do both at the same time.

As befits its sprawl, Fay Grim has a large cast: Saffron Burrows shows up as an agent of some kind or another, and Elina Lowensohn portrays a woman with whom Henry once had a torrid affair. The parade of publishers, spies and terrorists turn up like dutiful attendees at a convention. Hartley even finds a way to blow something up.

Despite the script's many convolutions, it's possible to get lost in the movie on a scene-by-scene basis. But as the laughs decreased, so did my tolerance for Hartley's tangled plot. Henry Fool had a quality of irresistible madness that sprang from Ryan's drive, conviction and chicanery. In the end - which is where I began - Fay Grim probably shares one unfortunate quality with the Hollywood movies so reviled in IndieWorld: It may be an unnecessary sequel.

Fay Grim

A woman searches for her lost husband

• Grade: C+

• Rated: R

• Running time: 118 minutes

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