Meanwhile life in the Grim house gets busy and steamy with restless Fay bringing home loser after loser to her bed until Henry's appearance consumes her. First resisting his rough hewn charm she falls for his charismatic force. Outside the house, local bullyboy Warren, after continual attempts at humiliating the heavily withdrawn Simon gets roped into activism for an ultra right political figure which mindset makes its sinuous way into a third act plot point (no spoilers) but is for the moment both funny and pathetic. This and further plot threads appear and entwine until the finale which, typical of the film's writer/director, is fraught and moving.
At the end of the '90s Hal Hartley was in a strange position. Having begun the decade with celebrated arthouse hits like The Unbelievable Truth and the breakthrough Trust. Quirky characters, deadpan humour with sharp one-liners and whimsical plot turns, his style was instantly recognisable and beloved. Then, having established himself with three features of equal quality he turned sharply with the messy Amateur (a kind of action film that also wanted to be cute) and the impenetrable Flirt (an anthology with every story beginning with the same dialogue).
With brash new kid on the block Quentin Tarrantino taking the breath out of almost everyone else on the indy circuit on one side and the emergence of beloved merchant of the prissy side of quirk Wes Anderson coming up on the other, Hartley would have felt both eclipsed and pushed out of his own niche. He could go on churning them out for the fanbase or change. When he changed the word of mouth turned sour. This choice appears to any artist with a clear style. There were jokes on sitcoms when Harry Connick Jr switched from old timey swing to funk.
Hartley never quite recovered from that lapse but when he returned to an old project in the late '90s he found a way to return to his glory style in older and wiser form. Henry Fool is his longest film but it also feels like his deepest. There are still brittle and quirky moments but these are delivered more smoothly than the flat toned quips of Trust etc. Most of the wit is kept to the title character rather than have most of the cast deliver on the droll which feels truer to life. There is a more deft use of rhythm and balance that allows Simon and Fay what feels like equal time on a screen dominated by Henry.
Hartley made a astute decision to avoid revealing Simon's poetry and Henry's extended written confession. It is almost always a mistake to show things like this. Woody Allen has frequently shown intellectuals whose tiresome cynicism or naïve philosophy renders them into levitated dunces. Max's overstaged theatrical productions in Rushmore only ever look like bullshit. On the other side, the paintings everyone is wowed by in the small but beautiful '80s indy I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing, are shown as squares of bright light. If we don't see the greatness we are free to imagine it unable to judge it which is best because it is never the point. Henry's poetry (he writes unconsciously in iambic pentameter) is variously deemed scatological, obscene as well as brilliant. That the sleazy publisher who at first humiliates Henry for a complete lack of talent swings on his heel as soon as he sees money in it. None of that can happen if the film would have to do a lot of work justifying writing that we might inevitably judge mediocre. A major theme throughout the film is the indisputability of taste served beautifully by this decision.
The power of Simon's verse gives Henry an opportunity to redeem a life of trouble. This last is like the poetry in that we get to know very little of it, have little faith that it might not just be Henry's fantasy about himself. But some of the things we do learn that no one would boast of are very dark. Henry's prose in counterpoint to Simon's poetry is deemed uninspired and unpublishable. This of course troubles him about what he presents as his life's work but he rises beyond the pride of that to recognise and promote Simon's writing. This leads to a third act action which by the time it happens doesn't surprise us about a character who might well have missed the mark and fallen into our disfavour as a self-important windbag. His genuinely funny spelling lesson on the uses of there/their/they're at the piano tells us both of the rawness of Simon's talent and genuineness of Henry's humility. The balance is beguiling.
Fay Grim with her self-punishing life uses Henry's entrance into her life as an opportunity to claim some form to it. Until then (and this is her doing it, not Henry guiding her) she had the example of her atrophying mother whose dressing gown days are kept quiet under a fog of prescription drugs and can now only screech against whatever the world puts before her. Her arc is one of the most eventful and meaningful of all the characters. Played by the then queen of indy Parker Posey, she injects a fragile strength in contrast to the male double act at the centre.
Thomas Jay Ryan was recruited well after the character was created but arrived as a perfect fit. Hairy, ursine, and frowningly intelligent, Ryan delivers words like "trouble" as though he's remembering the best sex he's ever had. He would later play Satan the exact same way in Hartley's millennial The Book of Life, by which time it felt cloying but here the match of actor to character gives the movie most of its memorability. In cast of players he's the sax that turns everything into a solo.
Preventing that from becoming fulsome is James Urbaniak's Simon. A thanklessly withdrawn performance that the film needs to keep things earthbound between Ryan and Posey. His idiot savant character won't raise a finger in his own defence. Even his own body revolts against this when, at a point of sickening bullying it does the talking for him. Hartley writes him a little too inconsistently with some outbursts feeling out of scope and has him understand a Latin saw and argue beyond his supposed level at times. Urbaniak smooths this with an impatient anger and it feels like an actor's call. As with Ryan this was his feature film debut.
Henry Fool was both a return to form for Hartley and a progression. Two flops with the arthouse crowd can kill the darlingest of auteurs but Henry Fool cut the spikes of the quirk and added a lot of warmth the earlier films lacked. He also quite nakedly examined his own relationship with creative success and how it affects everyone within touching distance. Hartley would return to the story twice more in Fay Grim and Ned Rifle, extending threads of two characters and still centring on Ryan's character and persona. They are both worth a view if you liked Henry Fool and don't feel like cash-ins but they don't approach the indy epic might of Hartley's most mature film. You'll thrill to the dizzying speed and feeling of Trust but Henry (both the film and the character) will make you think ... for longer.
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