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Hal Hartley is a one man film-making machine. According to the Internet Movie Database, he has directed 23 movies/short films. Of those, he wrote 17. In addition, he has solely (or at least helped) to compose the music for thirteen of his films. If anything, Hartley has to be called ambitious.

But are his movies any good? Henry Fool is my introduction to Hartley's film world, and unfortunately, my first response is one of mixed emotions. On one hand, Henry Fool is an almost ambient look at a drifter with delusions of grandeur and a garbage-man who finds his inner poetic genius. This aspect of the story is generally handled well, with the dynamic between Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) and Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) for the most part was able to keep me interested in the story, and wanting to see more. The peripheral storylines, however, involving Simon's sister, Fay Grim (Parker Posey), his mother (Maria Porter), a cynical priest (Nicholas Hope), and a "holier-than-thou" senator and his cronies, leave much to be desired.

The main problem seems to be that the main story is so strong that the momentary diversions seem unnecessary, adding little to the characters that the conversations between Henry and Simon did not. The story's focus is on Henry's personal demons (why he was in prison years before, why he refused to share his "Confessions" with anyone) and Simon's reluctant rise from being labeled "retarded" by his family to being a poetic prodigy, and that's where it should've stayed. The other storylines, the mother's depression, the priest's cynicism, the right-wing senator's campaign, all come and go with little fanfare, and yet take up at least a half hour of the movie.

The movie lives (and dies) on Hartley's dialogue and the performances from Ryan and Urbaniak. When they are together onscreen, the chemistry is palpable, and the dialogue seems both crisp and ambiguous. Apart, however, the dialogue drifts, and for the most part the supporting characters spout off petty annoyances rather than engage in developed introspection.

Hartley also makes two stylistic choices that continue to baffle me slightly. First, there's a scene (which seems to last at least a minute) where a character is a on a toilet and there are very loud flatulent sounds. It seems that, in a movie that seems constantly concerned with promoting the profundity of the story without alienating the viewer completely, a scene such as this only made me wonder whether the story really was all that profound, or was a ruse, much like Henry Fool's own deluded view of his own self-importance.

The second choice that puzzled me was that, for the first two-thirds of the movie, it seems that Simon Grim, and not Henry Fool, is the main character, despite the title of the movie. The last forty minutes, however, feature almost exclusively on Henry, with Simon's presence glaringly absent. The shift in focus mid-film is somewhat abrupt, and the lack of the Henry/Simon dynamic make the end portion of the film seem even slower than the rest, which is not a good thing for an already slow movie.

Henry Fool is not a failure, however. The dynamic between the two leads is engaging, and the segment of the story focusing on whether Simon's "magnum opus" is "art" or "pornography" is developed fully and powerfully. Unfortunately, the movie continues to trod along far after this storyline has reached its apex, and the ending is surprisingly rushed and anti-climatic.

It seems a shame that a movie with such promise should flounder so horribly in the end. Hartley definitely has a world-changing poem within him, but for now, it's hard to tell whether he's more Henry Fool or Simon Grim.

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Copyright 2008 Benjamin Wood