Fay Grim
Directed by Hal Hartley
As Parker Posey ages, she becomes more womanly and sexy. No longer simply the odd-ball chick whose small role in Sleep With Me stole the movie clean away from Tarantino’s Top Gun rant, Posey has displayed depths of personality within a range of characters from Party Girl to Personal Velocity and Blade: Trinity. She’s a good actress more than an indie queen, but when she’s in an indie movie she makes it as spectacular as a Hollywood blockbuster.
Posey commands Fay Grim so absolutely that it doesn’t at first seem to be a Hal Hartley movie. (She holds attention between the unnaturally long, intentionally arch dialog pauses.) In this sequel to Hartley’s unbearable 1998, Henry Fool, Posey portrays a single mother raising a teenage son in the absence of her husband, “the incarcerated garbage-man poet of Woodside, Queens,” Henry Fool. Fay has sensibly taken back her maiden name, but the oxymoron “Fay Grim” only accentuates Hartley’s whimsical conceit. Posey makes the character believable, irresistible. She deserves a more accurate name, say, Saucy Force.
Because of Posey, one hums along with the movie’s fanciful opening scenes under the misperception that this film about eccentric Americans will celebrate the resourcefulness of a distinctly modern woman. Fay is wise to her precocious son’s impudence, yet values individualism. Her complexity charms FBI agent Jeff Goldblum, who pressures her to reveal Henry’s whereabouts—something to do with national security, since Henry has appeared in Europe where he is involved with a Middle Eastern terrorist. This premise—a disarming young wife drawn into danger by the specter of her presumed-dead husband—recalls the 1963 film Charade, which Jonathan Demme amiably updated in The Truth About Charlie. Problem is, Hartley only does a charade of Charade. Fay Grim, unfortunately, shows no sense of humor about a smart young wife’s intuition, no belief in goodness winning out over deception. Turns out, those risible lines about Henry Fool being a profound but misunderstood poet (“Illogical, pedantic, inconsistent but not gibberish”) are meant to be taken seriously.
Hartley rejects romantic comedy possibilities in favor of some self-congratulatory trip about “avant-garde, iconoclastic poetry becoming less popular in America,” thus championing opportunistic Henry and his Bin Laden look-alike crony. Hartley virtually throws the plot away from Posey to make vague commentary on global avarice and the decline of intellectual culture.
In Hartley’s best film, Surviving Desire, his imitation of European art-films worked a weird charm. Here, he’s taken proud idiosyncrasy way past enjoyment. Fay Grim loses its grip on its heroine and her struggle to cope with post-9/11 turmoil and distrust. Though pristinely made, it digresses like a Celine and Julie Go Boating gone wrong—pleased with its own whimsy, but leaving a powerful, magnetic actress stranded in Eurotrash.
