Henry Fool, Film Review

Thoughtful Silliness

by Bruce Cantwell

The Grim household is aptly named. Mother (Maria Porter) is housebound, either for her medical condition or her own inclination. Her unemployed daughter Kay (Parker Posey) splits her time between caring for Mom and screwing anything in pants. Simon (Joe Urbaniak), her son is an unbearibly shy sanitation worker (Joe Urbaniak).

From the moment we spot Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) striding purposefully toward the Grim house, we know that he’s going to rock this world of housecoats, bad hair and yawns. Henry is pretentious as hell, as full of himself as a sack of manure, and alien to anything folks in this sleepy urban backwater have known.

While Henry researches his epic “Confession,” (currently a stack of composition books bound by a leather belt) he urges Simon to write down his thoughts. What Simon writes, no one in the film or in the audience could predict.

Watching Henry Fool is a bit like watching an Olympic event. We appreciate the difficulty points while enjoying the execution.

The performances of the Vietnamese shopkeeper (James Saito), the local punk turned political activist (Kevin Corrigan), and the disaffected sister (Posey) would all have been as entertaining in a less ambitious project.

Hartley walks a tightrope here, ratcheting up the intellectual level of the film to consider a plethora of major ideas that never make their way into mainstream films and seldom surface in independent features. To balance himself, he goes for the biggest, broadest laughs of his career.

Hartley’s audacity alone would make the film worth seeing. Go to enjoy the comedy and you can discuss the the film’s ideas in Internet chat rooms at your leisure.