As far as I can tell, nobody's been clamoring for a sequel to Hal Hartley's ribald 1997 comedy Henry Fool, even though it's been largely downhill for the filmmaker in the decade since. That's not a major problem, however, since Fay Grim, which shifts focus to the title character's estranged wife (Parker Posey), bears only the most tenuous relation to its predecessor. Clearly alarmed by recent global chaos, Hartley has basically airlifted the original film's principal cast into an espionage thriller, with Henry's oft-mentioned, ne'er-revealed eight-volume Confessions now reconceived as a geopolitical time bomb written in some impossibly arcane code. Imagine tossing a typical Hartley script into a blender alongside two fat Tom Clancy potboilers, so that the former's deadpan aphorisms wind up enmeshed within the latter's byzantine procedure, and you'll have a reasonably — perhaps disturbingly — accurate sense of Fay Grim's sensibility.
I wish I could say that this conceit ultimately transcends its po-faced absurdity, since for the first hour or so — while you still can't work out what the hell is going on — the movie has an endearingly loopy comic fizz, thanks to the ensemble's deft way with Hartley's ludicrous dialogue. (Jeff Goldblum fits right in as a duplicitous CIA agent.) For all that time, Henry Fool, last seen running frantically either toward or away from a plane in the original film's ambiguous final shot, remains pointedly offscreen — a brilliant formal gambit that Hartley unwisely abandons. Constantly spoken of in awestruck tones, glimpsed only in fleeting flashback, the character functions as a strange sort of totem, embodying both memory and mystery; when he finally does turn up (in the person of Thomas Jay Ryan, still arrestingly repellent), and has nothing to offer, you can practically see the movie deflate before your eyes.
(Like everything else in Fay Grim, this happens at a thirty-degree angle — for no apparent reason, most shots are canted to the left or right.)
Which is a shame. Like many sui generis filmmakers — Atom Egoyan is another recent example — Hartley more or less exhausted his creative reserves after five or six similar-yet-different movies, and has been searching for rejuvenation ever since. Much like his little-seen previous feature, The Girl from Monday, Fay Grim comes across as the work of someone trying very hard to harmonize his established style with a newfound sense of purpose, one borne of anger (at what's happening in the
world) and frustration (at his own stasis). He's still flailing, but you can't help but admire the attempt.
— Mike D'Angelo
