Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Hal Hartley's debut film, The Unbelievable Truth, is the story of a mechanic returning home to his old neighborhood on Long Island after serving time in prison for manslaughter. It's a bizarre love story between Josh and Audry. Josh is played by Robert Burke (Thinner). He was serving time for the killing of his girlfriends father... Could have been the girlfriend. He might have raped her then shot her... Or maybe he drove the father to commit suicide from the loss of his daughter at Josh's hands... He committed a crime while he was drunk, that you're sure of, just not which one.

The Plot
As you might expect, there's a small army of acquaintances, friends, and families somehow connected to Josh who quickly turn their own lives upside down by Josh's sudden return and rather unconventional behavior (he doesn't drink and never seems to get angry, alien behavior in this neighborhood). He gets a job working for Chris Cooke (Trust, I Married a Strange Person) as a mechanic. He of course is wary of Josh at first, but gradually begins to be tolerate him due to his outstanding mechanical skills.
Pretty soon Josh meets up with Audry (Adrienne Shelley), Chris Cooke's daughter, through their mutual fascination with George Washington. Audry is immediately curious about Josh. She knows he's been in prison so she decides to ask Pearl, Josh's dead ex-girlfriend's sister about him. Pearl was there the night her father died, but doesn't seem to remember it all that well. All she knows is that the two had an argument and soon her father was lying dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs. She bears no grudge against Josh though and thinks of him as a kind person. Anyway, Pearl describes her fuzzy memory of the event everyone else has already heard to Audry, whereupon she quickly becomes infatuated with Josh in that way that all nuclear bomb/George Washington enthusiasts fall in love with ex-cons.

Pretty soon, Shelley becomes tired of waiting for an apparently abstinent (mistaken for high morals i suppose) Josh to sleep with her and decides to focus on her budding modeling career by moving to New York with the desperate fashion photographer. Soon though, the ever so easily swayed Chris Cooke is convinced by Mike that Josh is a much better companion to Audry than any other guy probably ever could be, so Cooke, desperate to find a good man for his daughter so she'll settle down and quit posing naked in perfume ads, gives Josh 500 bucks and insists he go to New York to take her to dinner. Burke and Shelley are great in the movie.

The Characters
Josh is a rather quiet character, not shy, just quiet. He tries not to draw attention to himself, probably out of shame for what he did, even though due to being drunk at the time he doesn't even fully remember. He simply reads, fixes cars, and goes about his business. He's the kind of person that works against his talent of having something interesting to say, by refusing to get too involved with people.
Audry is an distant, almost existential teen infatuated with nuclear destruction. She's always pausing, hearing sounds of bombs dropping that no one else seems capable of, considering they're all usually too busy focusing on opportunities open to them in the real world. The scenes with her sitting at the kitchen table zoned out thinking about death and destruction while drowning out her parents lecture on college with bombing noise in her head is funny and all too familiar.
Among the neighborhood folk, several characters stick out, most notably Chris Cooke as Audry's overprotective, easily-offended, conservative, yet oddly endearing father. He apparently loves his daughter but has the ability to hold out on expressing this until she agrees to go to college and make something of herself.
Edie Falco (The Sopranos), who along with Shelley, Cooke, and a few others, returns in Hartley's next film Trust, plays one of Pearl's fellow waitress's at the local diner where she works. It's a minor role but one of the more memorable ones. She basically chews gum and assumes she knows everything about everyone based on facts she doesn't have and probably never will, through out the entire movie.
In other words, she talks a lot of sh^t.
The rest of the cast is evenly rounded by an overly confident fashion photographer who hits on practically every female he has lines with, Mike, Cooke's co-worker and whipping boy to him and confidant to Josh. Shelley's mother, and Shelley's Wall Street reject ex-boyfriend, Emmett. There are several subplots concerning relationships between them all throughout the movie. Some develop rather nicely, some don't

This is one of those films with plenty of conflict, but not much violence (the most you get are drunken shoving matches, usually over Shelley). Hartley's characters solve (or attempt to solve and fail miserably) most conflicts in the film with dialogue, whether it's name calling, challenging one another's morals, or giving up on one other. The dialogue is without a doubt the highlight of the film, as in most of the director's movies, especially Trust. It's a very light hearted movie, for the most part, but should appeal to most anyone who enjoys listening to arguments, or simply have a genuine interest in what people have to say.

Aside from directing, writing, and producing, Hartley also did the excellent score for the film. I read an interview with Hartley once where he discusses how he more often prefers solitude because of the time it gives him to think and he obviously incorporates this heavily into the music of the film. The music is, above all, distant. It complements it's characters better in this film than in most others I've seen. Scenes where Audry is walking with her boyfriend/ex-boyfriend Emmett, hearing him talk about opportunities opening up for him in the world, but listening for bombs instead, has a simple piano solo which fits in well with the melancholy, apocalyptic feel you get from her. The soundtrack is very simple, consisting of piano solos to bass and drum beats most often heard when Burke is on screen looking determined with no real agenda. Hardly ever does it seem inappropriate, with the exception of a few scenes.

This is not a flawless film, the characters, at times, seem one dimensional and self-absorbed. They tend to focus more on the image of each other and not the real person sometimes making them seem shallow, even though I don't think it was intentional it is a believable trait of real people, making it hard to consider as an inconsistency in the filmmaking. Even so, the film is truly deserving of a four star rating. The ending seems rhetoric as you're left to wonder if what it implies really happens or is another metaphor, and as much as I hate to admit this, as much as i'm ashamed to say this, as dirty as this makes me feel, it seems rather... uplifting. Egh... must go watch cannibal movie... quickly...

P.S. I recommend reading Wokelstein's Trust review if you like Hartley stuff.




Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age