"A politic, if you will; a work of genius to shake society to its knees"
Written: Jan 13 '03 (Updated Feb 08 '03)
Product Rating:
Pros: Three vivid actors who could carry a movie; a supporting cast who don't make them.
Cons: It reports, you decide.
The Bottom Line: A deep (but amusing) movie about art, about self-promotion, about how lust relates to love, and about the measure of obligation owed to the person who saves you.
There's a short scene in the middle of Henry Fool, that has, i think, the least plot-spoiler value of any in the film. It has spectacular novice poet Simon Grim (played with buzz-haired, bespectacled, too-skinny gawkiness by James Urbaniak) walk in on his mother, with whom he lives, as she plays pretty Debussy-ish piano. Sensing him, she shuts the piano lid. "Keep going", says Simon, "it's nice". She looks at him steadily: "Yes, it is nice. But it's unremarkable". "Does that matter?", Simon asks, surprised. "Yes, it does", she insists. The piano lid stays closed.
Another scene shortly after (slight spoiler value) features a working-class man we recently saw looking very spiffy, when he was campaigning for a cause. He's now looking greasy again in T and jeans, lifting weights. "We lost", he explains, or something similar as this time i paraphrase. "I tried to make a difference, to give the country something it needs, to put things on course and make the world righter. And i lost. Why shouldn't i give up and let people rot in their own stupidity?"
The second scene could've occurred in any time frame; the first would have made no sense before the early-mid 20th century. In 1900, or 1864 (for those of you who saw/read Little Women and have the mental images ready), people made their own entertainment, for better and worse. Simon's Mom, with "nice" piano talents, would likely have been as good as anyone else she'd heard, what with no Victrolas around; the amibitious 17-year-old poet boy next door would obviously pale next to Shakespeare but not be obviously worse than anyone in town. The 35-year-old guy sitting on his rear end watching pro hockey would then have had to get out and exercise his own skates and bones. The play your daughters staged for your Christmas amusement wouldn't pale next to, say, a professionally acted screenplay like Henry Fool, because there were no screenplays.
There were just as many remarkable people in the past (relative to population), i'm sure, but there were two huge differences. Nice-but-unremarkable people didn't feel as embarrassed by them, AND, remarkable people couldn't get nearly as rich and famous since they weren't broadcast everywhere. People with the talent of Simon Grim -- or with the determination of some hypothetical campaigner who _didn't_ revert to muscle shirts and drink when logic said to give up -- have always been a people apart. Nowadays, the differences are very sharp, transmitted potentially worldwide in months. Nowadays, superstars (of popular appeal, hard work, or both) exist. Presumably, superstars may want to stay close to the non-superstars who were important to them, but in the difficulty of sharing their world lies a classic story. VH1's Behind the Music has milked it repeatedly; Henry Fool's version is warmer, less generic, more real, and more heroic.
The first superstar we're aware of here is Henry himself, tailored and haircut like a wealthy man from those idealized 1800's, one with a passing, occasional familiarity with the shaving razor. He is working on his literary masterpiece. His confession, if you will; "what did you do?", asks Simon, an aboveground resident of the home where Henry rents a basement, and Henry blows smoke dramatically while answering "I've been bad. (puff) Very bad. (puff) But, i shouldn't boast". He was jailed in a set-up, by a world terrified of what he could do it were he not silenced. "The truth!? You can't handle the truth!!" is not a line he utters, but only because he avoids exact copies, and doesn't have the indignity to shout. (Buying pornography in bulk is NOT indignity: "I learn quite a lot from these magazines. I do not discriminate among different modes of knowledge")
Simon is a garbageman whose most important line to Henry, as they meet, is "I'm not retarded". After an unconvincing i-believe-you reply, "People always think i am! Because... you know... i don't...". Henry gives Simon a pad to write down thoughts he can't express. Very soon it becomes clear to Henry that we have two earth-shaking geniuses in the house, and that Simon needs encouragement to make poetry the next big subversive thing. Very soon after that, it becomes clear Simon might just have a chance. And that as he tries, his relationships with Henry and with the more ordinary people he knows and loves will change, enough to build a movie around.
Cast notes about Henry Fool: first of all, their neighborhood of Queens operates as something of a village, the same adult characters hanging out in the same reliable places, their lives interacting; i will assume that, among extroverts, this is realistic. All of the supporting characters at least hint at complexity, though only Simon, his sister Fay, and Henry fully reach it. The sex scenes are all rather comic, but two of them are also poignant. Thomas Jay Ryan (Henry) skillfully plays his character's bravado, self-doubt, and self-belief against each other; Parker Posey, a fine actress usually busy redeeming movies that are Interesting rather than Good, is pretty enough to make a romantic lead without needing to act in any way romantic.
Finally, the crucial style quirk of the movie. Director Hal Hartley (who also composed the excellent score) frequently does not show you central scenes in the movie -- he shies away from the ones most painful for its characters. Instead we see the consequences, inferring what happened. (A similar trick keeps him from ever quoting you even a line of Simon's poetry, which at first bothered me but later seemed inevitable. Simon's poetry is captivating to some, repulsive to many more, and who's going to get the audience to buy this if, knowing the poetry, they only feel the "captivating" or the "repulsive"?).
Mostly, this is just extraordinarily courteous to the characters and makes them that much more oddly real, as if they were documentary subjects (e.g. Wilco in I am Trying to Break Your Heart) being spared the cameras at crucial moments in their lives (e.g. kicking Jay Bennet out of the band). We still know what happens; the after-effects are still dramatic and well-scripted. It also means, though, that at a crucial moment late in the movie, we don't actually find out whether Henry collects a debt owed to him; and yet one more time after, his performance will again be left in doubt. Maybe we're being spared chances to squirm; or maybe, unfairly, we're left to doubt a heroism that should not be doubted. For me, it's been much more interesting to decide than to know.
Acclaimed writer/director Hal Harley s (Amateur, Flirt), Henry Fool is a Faustian black comedy that will leave you screaming with laughter at its wild...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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