Hal Does Have A Heart

They make a strange menagerie, the Hal Hartley clan. The people in his odd, alert comedies (Trust, Amateur, Flirt) inhabit some Long Island of the mind, where Amy Fisher-style melodrama rubs up against working-class angst. They are part strong, silent types, part East Coast neurotics. They revel in their own contradictions; one Hartley heroine, a nymphomaniac virgin, explains the anomaly by saying, "I'm choosy." His creatures will sit mute and mopey, then turn endlessly articulate once they get going. Self-conscious but not self-aware, skeptical yet wildly romantic, they have a horror of the personal commitment to which they are also drawn. A girl asks her dyspeptic beau, "Will you trust me?" and he says, "If you'll trust me first." They are exasperating, endearing--perfect totems for the seen-it-all '90s.

So far, audiences haven't chosen to see much of Hartley. Each of his first six features (two of which are compilations of short films) has earned less than $1 million at the North American box office. His wonderfully intransigent pictures--neither chipper enough to appeal to the indie-film date crowd nor exotic enough to qualify as critical cult objects--survive on funding from Britain, Japan and Germany, where they are art-house staples. If not for this offshore financing, Hartley, 38, might be working as a radio repairman or a garbageman--jobs that keep his heroes occupied when they aren't playing chess with their gnarly demons. That could change with Henry Fool, the intimate epic that made a splash at festivals last year and has now opened in U.S. movie houses. No less quirkish and studied than his earlier films, this one has an expansiveness, a rowdiness and emotional generosity, that flows directly from its ribald antihero.

Henry Fool--what a guy! He materializes, like the answer to a dark prayer, in a Queens neighborhood where a sanitation worker named Simon Grim (the glumly funny James Urbaniak) is literally lying in the street waiting for...something. Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan, pinwheeling raffish charisma) has everything, and too much of it. He swaggers, smokes, guzzles beer, grabs life by the butt and gives it a fat smack. He makes abrupt love to Simon's morbid mother (Maria Porter) and bored sister (Parker Posey). He is, he tells Simon, an artist, the author of a huge, unpublished tome called My Confession; and he encourages Simon to lift himself from lethargy and create his own masterpiece.

Dwelling in the sulfurously lighted basement apartment of Simon's house, Henry is the Devil--a devil, anyway--with a gift for inspiring those he does not repel. An apt pupil, Simon composes a long poem that some people hate ("Drop dead," reads a publisher's rejection note; "keep your day job") but others champion. Simon becomes a literary celebrity, and in gratitude to his mentor says he will insist that his publisher also issue Henry's opus. Then, alas, he reads it.

We never hear a line of either Henry's or Simon's work. One or both may have great lyrical beauty and ethical depth; one or both may be junk. It matters not, for this is less a tale of literary gamesmanship than a parable of friendship. What would you do for a friend, a lover, the family you feel trapped by? Who deserves your most annihilating sacrifice? What are friends for, anyway?