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FAY GRIM
Directed, Written, Edited & Music by: Hal Hartley.
Produced by: Hartley, Michael S. Ryan, Martin Hagemann, Jason Kliot & Joana Vicente.
Director of Photography: Sarah Cawley Cabiya.
Released by: Magnolia Pictures.
Language: English.
Country of Origin: USA/Germany. 118 min. Rated R.
With: Parker Posey, Jeff Goldblum, James Urbaniak, Liam Aiken, Elina Löwensohn, Thomas Jay Ryan & Anatole Taubman.

It is almost 10 years since the mysterious braggart Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) fled Woodside, Queens, after inspiring anarchy, creativity, pornography, and scandal in his titular film. As with most lead characters created by laconic indie satirist Hal Hartley, he was fleeing both the law and love.

Hartley reunites the cast of Henry Fool – he has said wouldn’t have even bothered writing a sequel unless Parker Posey agreed to grow with Fay Grim. Her sex-crazed party girl/rebel, the least quirky character, has now matured into a responsible and feisty single mother who can hold her own as an innocent abroad in Europe. Now 16, Liam Aiken returns as Henry and Fay’s son, Ned, already showing challenging similarities to his wayward dad. Henry Fool's plot highlights are revisited so that it is not absolutely necessary to have seen the earlier film. Its fans will immediately chuckle at the sight of Fay’s brother Simon, bespectacled James Urbaniak as the garbage man turned incendiary poet, now in jail, and bearded Chuck Montgomery as his mercenary publisher Angus James (and of course, there’s Hartley’s signature glimpse at uniformed school girls).

Fay is recruited by fast-talking, conniving CIA agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) to retrieve Henry’s multi-volume memoir that has been copied and interpreted through Europe’s criminal and terrorist underground, and sought after by competing gunmen like a Maltese falcon. With Hartley’s continued droll digs at censorship and celebrity culture, Henry’s unpublished confessions have gained both literary and political notoriety. His unknown past turns out to have coincided with US and Russian interventionist misadventures from Chile to Chechnya. With the disgusted assistance of various religious experts, his scatological descriptions are eventually revealed to be coded secrets about government plots, or maybe satellite codes.

Flashbacks to Henry’s past are inserted with labels like “1998: Somewhere Over the Atlantic,” and scenes appear with chapter headings, such as “Back at Home: The Writing on the Wall” and “Ten Hours Later: Fulbright’s Confession.” But the story gets bogged down in double agent revelations that are amusing but too imitative of all those madcap James Bond spy spoofs from the 1960’s.

Though Faye is inspired to undertake her mission by her love for Henry, what is missing until the end is the central romantic connection between odd characters that have magnetically enlivened Hartley’s films for almost 20 years, such as in Trust, Simple Men, Amateur, and No Such Thing. Recalling the relationship between Henry and Simon in the prequel, the fulcrum turns out to be a fascinating friendship between notorious fugitives, expressed through a compelling exchange about fame and loyalty between voluble Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan) and quiet Jihadist Jallal Said Khan (Anatole Taubman). Nora Lee Mandel
May 18, 2007