Chapter Two: Fay Grim
By Brett Beach
March 31, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The feature concerning the further exploits of Mr. Fool’s wife and brother-in-law made about $126,000 playing for about a month in a handful of locations in the late spring of 2007 (it was one of the early films to be released in the theaters and on DVD within the same week.) Until I made the decision to review Fay Grim for this week’s column, it’s safe to say that my first answer to the question “Is there a sequel to Henry Fool?” would be a too-quick “No” — and I had seen Fay Grim on the big screen!
Henry Fool isn’t the sort of film that it does any good to label a masterpiece, for as accomplished as it is, it’s far from the easiest film to love. It’s a sprawling, messy, vulgar, violent, deadpan scattershot satire that seemed to be completely out of step with its time back then. Now, with 13 years hindsight, it proves to be a remarkable time capsule of the late '90s in terms of attitudes, politics, and social change in a tight-knit community, and to have been remarkably prescient about what lay ahead in the decade to come.
Fay Grim is a reaction to the 2000s and casts off the bonds of love/hate that tie us together at a local level for a more sullen, less quirky globetrotting look at the complete lack of ties among the international community, via a small cadre of undercover agents from various countries eagerly willing to bump one another off to get their hands on a set of coded notebooks that seem to spill the beans on any number of state secrets concerning any number of the world’s countries.
Henry Fool, like many of Hartley’s films from the '90s (The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Amateur) alternates between moments of cockeyed realism and quietness and brutal — though usually bloodless — moments of unexpected violence and out-of-left-field plot twists. In its most disgusting and romantic moment, the intestinal distress caused by seven espressos (with sound effects that far surpass Jeff Daniels’ similar moment in Dumb & Dumber), and a metal fitting from a drainpipe mistaken for a wedding ring, result in an offhand gesture construed as a wedding proposal.
At the core is a trio of oddball characters - a Mephistophelean stranger with a criminal record (who I now realize is a visual ringer for David Foster Wallace) forever working on his multi-volume “Confessions”; the put-upon garbage man he inspires to also become a writer; and the garbage man’s sister, she of low self-esteem and a forever revolving bedroom door—followed over about seven years. The significant changes in their lives are accentuated by the visible, but never overtly framed, life movements in their milieu.
The local corner convenience store is forever transforming: into a coffee bar, a poetry club, and finally, a rock n’ roll venue. The local corner crack head cleans up his appearance, wears a suit to campaign for a high-profile Republican congressional candidate, and ultimately settles into his new role as abusive husband and sexually violent stepfather. It’s the purple plot antics of any number of soap operas, but Hartley pushes them towards the level of the mock epic with a surprisingly hefty 137 min running time, and leaves the viewer with a final ambiguous shot that suggests both complete freedom and a defining imprisonment.
Fay Grim doesn’t so much subvert, contradict, or call into question the events of Henry Fool as it simply adds another, quite nonsensical, layer beneath them all. (As an experiment for anyone who has never seen either, I would be curious if watching Fay Grim first would make Henry Fool more or less enjoyable). This new level seems hatched off the kind of conceit that an actor uses when creating for their own benefit a thorough biography for the character they are about to play.
To sum up simply, it is revealed that Henry Fool, far from being only a convicted felon with a sketchy past and no future, is actually a lifelong CIA operative who has been on hand at some of the USA’s more notorious operations over the last 30 years. With him missing and presumed dead, Henry’s widow Fay is approached by the CIA to help them retrieve his “Confessions,” which apparently are coded messages meant to embarrass the country by revealing national security secrets. Fay is reluctantly roped into the operation and travels across Europe and Asia, finding herself a pawn in a game of international intrigue. As loopy as that may sound, it plays a lot less broad than you would imagine.
There a few key things to focus in on in regards to Fay Grim that distinctly separate it from Henry Fool (aside from, of course, the whole “he’s a spy” plot twist.)
For starters, it’s a more “gorgeous” but also more sterile looking film. Cinematographer Sarah Cawley shot on digital lending a distinct otherworldly quality to the rare moments of “action” in the film (which Hartley who also edited and did the score, expresses through a quick succession of still shots, finding another avenue to render violence less, um, violent) but also preventing the film from feeling anything like a travelogue. Many scenes are set in hotel rooms, on rooftops, or secluded side streets so that a film that actually was shot on location feels remarkably boxed in by generics.
Fay Grim is also a much angrier film, politically fueled, without the satiric tweaking of a broad range of subjects and targets that Henry Fool contains. The focus is almost exclusively on the international policy scene. Jeff Goldblum uses his ironic demeanor and a comic cynicism to play a rival CIA spook that has long been obsessed with bringing Fool in. He is primarily a foil, but simmering just below the surface is a rage brought on by a sense of superiority being impinged upon by having to muck around with “real people” like Fay Grim. Without any overt references to 9/11, Hartley’s film is distinctly set in a world reeling from the fallout of that attack, where some peoples or groups seem to have been locked in for lifetime of ceaseless suspicion and doubt. There is a terrorist in Fay Grim and an act of terror, but it seems to function more as a plot device to wipe clean most of the new characters added for this film.
Fay Grim is very slanted in its presentation of the material. Literally. The entire film was shot using only Dutch, or canted, angles, (definition for those not in the know: the camera is tilted so the shot is composed with the horizon at an angle to the bottom of the frame). I do not know Hartley’s reasoning in regards to this but as you might imagine when something not commonly employed becomes the standard, after a while the mind corrects the tilting and it barely becomes noticeable. Perhaps it’s as simple as creating a world where everything has become skewed all the time. (Fun fact: there are two scenes in the film that were shot normal by accident and the “mistake” was not caught. I was able to catch one during this viewing.)
In an interview given at the time of the film’s release, Hartley was questioned as to the idea of making a sequel to a film like Henry Fool and revealed that it was always his intention to continue on in that particular universe with those particular characters, just not in the manner that might be expected. He is right to consider Henry Fool (the movie and the character) so vast as to contain multitudes. Much like its title character’s oft-discussed but never quoted from (well almost never) work in progress, Henry Fool spills over with sloppiness and shagginess and suggests at times that it might just be a visualization of the epic tome in question.
And I am all for Hartley bringing back his creations in drastically altered circumstances, as well as a completely different genre, and seeing where there lives go from there. I even forgive him for providing a concrete answer to the uncertainty of Henry Fool’s ending that I love so much. What ultimately leaves Fay Grim unsatisfying is how, in the final analysis, Henry and Fay and Simon are right back where they started, with a pleasantly ambiguous ending, one that might lead someday perhaps to a third installment (Simon Grim?), but one that also results from the complete nullification of everything that has come before. It’s a cliffhanger ending in a way, and one can easily imagine Hartley proceeding with a musical next time around (or a horror film, or a Western...) to further the exploits of Henry, Fay, and Simon. They belong to the world at large now and that should be a victory. Right? Funny thing is, I think I liked them better when they just belonged to the neighborhood crack head.
Next time: a pair of Chapter Twos from August ’96: The long time coming big-budget sequel to a 1981 cult classic, and a quickly churned-out follow up to a surprise comedy hit from the previous year.