Hal Hartley, once one of the shining lights of the American indie scene, continues to chart his puzzling way through a career. Hartley’s first few movies, including “The Unbelievable Truth” and “Trust,” showed off his talent for writing wonderfully sideways dialogue and deadpan characters.
His most recent offerings, including “No Such Thing” and “The Girl from Monday,” have been disappointing and somewhat impenetrable. Hartley’s new film, “Fay Grim,” promised much, however: It’s a loose sequel to his quirky 1998 film “Henry Fool.”
Seeing that movie first might help, but I’m afraid “Fay Grim” would still be a convoluted jumble. Some of the actors from “Henry Fool” return, centrally Parker Posey, and the movie works best as a showcase for her flinty talents.
Posey’s character, Fay, is now raising her adolescent son (Liam Aiken) by the long-departed Henry Fool. Her famous writer brother, Simon Grim (James Urbaniak, also returning), is in prison.
CIA agents, played by Jeff Goldblum and Leo Fitzpatrick, begin dropping hints to Fay that Henry Fool’s notebooks, filled with his crazed writings, might be connected to international espionage.
Somehow this leads Fay to traipsing across the globe, Paris and Istanbul to be exact, in a kind of joke version of a spy movie. And yet Hartley obviously wants to make some points about the state of international relations, and even terrorism, which he does in the movie’s endless string of dialogue scenes.
Hartley’s work seems increasingly concerned with “saying something” rather than tracking the intimate fluctuations of the human heart. That’s his right, but it’s becoming harder to stick with his stories, especially when there’s little conventional suspense involved.
Posey can pretty much do anything, as she proved last year in three wildly diverse roles: “Superman Returns,” “The Oh in Ohio,” and “For Your Consideration.” She cuts a stylish figure here as she slouches through hotel lobbies and delivers poker-faced spy-movie patter.
Thomas Jay Ryan re-creates his role from “Henry Fool,” and Goldblum seems perfectly at home in Hartley’s oddball universe. None of which changes this movie’s status as a first-class head-scratcher.
Parker Posey stars in “Fay Grim.”
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