Henry Fool
Henry Fool is the latest film by Hal Hartley, a Canadian writing, directing and producing dynamo (Amateur, Trust and Surviving Desire). This film will not disappoint fans, carrying all of the hallmarks of a Hartley film except one: actor Martin Donovan, whom I suspect is off doing more financially rewarding films. Anyway, for the uninitiated, Hartley’s films are always based around quirky characters who blurt out the strangest and most interesting things, often in a stilted way (Hartley’s scripts must be terrible to learn) that could be bad acting, bad direction, unwieldy scripting, or just a kind of style that you come to think of as particularly Hal’s. A far cry from the slick production values of Amateur, it is grainy and stark, like the lives of the characters. Thomas J Ryan plays Henry Fool as I would have expected Martin Donovan to and resembles him in many ways. Hartley’s band plays most of the music in the film.
The story: Simon is a tall, gawky, geeky, quiet young garbage collector. We meet him watching a couple having sex in an alley where he is working. He is embarrassed but can’t stop watching this act that in all likelihood he would never be involved in during his life if it continued on an uninterrupted course. However, into his life strides Henry Fool, a well dressed, mysterious man who walks into the basement room Simon’s sick mother wants to rent out. Henry begins to enchant the quiet Simon with his talk of being a writer on the brink of finishing the greatest work of the century, his confession — “a pornographic novel of truly comic book proportions”. Henry hands Simon a blank notebook and says “You ever feel like you’ve got something to say and you can’t get it out, stop and write it down”. Simon begins to write, and the result is an epic poem that gets noticed by more and more people, having a profound effect on each, and so the story goes for almost two hours. By the end, seven years have been spanned, truths about the characters have come out, some have died, some have been redeemed, and some have realised their dreams. I thoroughly recommend Henry Fool to fans and soon to be fans alike.
Esther
