Changing tack a little bit, IFC ran this movie earlier this summer. I probably watched it 4-5 times. Parts of the movie are still with me. It's kind of low key, so you're not really aware the movie is getting under your skin as you watch - and listen. The dialogue is superb. I'm very interested in seeing his other movies now.
Simple Men
"I would hate to be a moralist, because I'm very uncertain how I feel about almost anything. But storytelling takes vague or abstract notions and makes you deal with them in a concrete way" (Hal Hartley)
Early in Hal Hartley's Simple Men (1992) Bill McCabe (Robert Burke) states his credo; "There's no such thing as adventure and romance. There's only trouble and desire. But the funny thing is when you desire something you immediately get into trouble. And when you get into trouble, you don't desire anything at all". Such deadpan philosophy comes easily to Hartley's heroes. Disaffected suburban cowboys, who might have stumbled out of a Sam Shepherd play or taken leave from a Raymond Carver story, they lurch around laconically, making gnomic remarks which seek to explain the universe concisely. Of course, contrary to McCabe's assertion, there is romance and adventure in abundance in trouble and desire, and it is this Hartley seeks to harness in Simple Men
In Hal Hartley's film the heroes, as the title would suggest, are straightforward impassive figures who adhere to idiomatic philosophies and believe that life can be reduced to stark truths. Their raw, credulous optimism is matched by the structure of the film, which opens like a sardonic comic strip in mid-robbery, and soon establishes itself as a quest for these latter-day "searchers" to embark upon.
Simple Men is ostensibly a road-movie about two brothers - armed robber Bill and penniless student Dennis (Bill Sage) searching Long Island for their estranged father, an ex-baseball player turned political terrorist (an amalgam of establishment hero and sixties idealist). The true subject of the film, though, is the way men look to women to reconcile their various needs in them.
In Simple Men the Long Island setting is presented as a quintessentially mysterious place. Though the McCabe brothers have apparently lived all their lives in urban New York - New Jersey - they seem not at all sure where Long Island is. When the train from the city deposits them, they appear utterly disorientated moving hesitantly away from the station and its non-descript surroundings. This sense of dislocation soon proves justified, as they encounter, among other characters, a cigarette smoking nun who assaults a policeman, throwing him to the ground, a beautiful Romanian epileptic, an earth-mother café owner nervously awaiting the return of her psychotic ex-husband, and a local sheriff in the throes of existential torment. All of these characters populate the landscape in which the brothers seek their father.
The young idealist Dennis resolves to find and confront his anarchist/outlaw father, as if a basic meeting will resolve life's mysteries and provide him with the key how to continue. Bill, the older, more cynical brother, double-crossed by his girlfriend Vera and another accomplice during a computer fraud/heist, has evolved his own intrinsic variation on the Machiavellian credo that everybody, from the government down is a crook, and that the only real distinction is between the "heroes", who get away and the "villains" who are caught. The boy's father is depicted as a neat amalgam of both sons' visions. In this equation scenario Hartley deploys the Lawrenthian notion of women as the site of mystery dually to deflect the boys' quest and undermine their overtly straightforward concept of the state of things and how things should transpire.
Narratively the film runs as a series of inter-connecting set-pieces:
The boys visit their mother, and Bill gives her what he has left from the robbery, while Dennis turns over his scholarship money. She offers Dennis a clue to their father's whereabouts, giving him a name, "Tara", and a Long Island telephone number. The brothers venture as far into Long Island as their remaining $15 will take them, Bill cynically declaring that he is less interested in finding their father - whose political activities he scorns - than in seducing and abandoning the next beautiful woman he meets, in revenge for Vera's betrayal: "The first good-looking blonde woman I see, I'm gonna make her fall in love with me ... and then I'm gonna fuck her".
Bill swaps his gun for a motorbike which he repairs, and the boys take off when the police arrive in pursuit. Travelling through the countryside, they encounter Kate (Karen Sillas), who runs Homer's Oyster Bar, and her companion Elina (Elina Lowensohn), the Romanian epileptic. When they arrive at Kate's inn, what started as a road-movie turns inwards as the brothers strive to come to terms with emotions which their superficial theories of life cannot accommodate.
Kate invites the brothers to stay, ostensibly because she is grateful for their help with Elina but also because she is scared that her psychotic husband, Jack (Joe Stevens), who has threatened to kill her, has recently been released from prison. Bill, falling under Kate's spell, is all for abandoning the quest for their father, and Dennis reluctantly agrees to stay at the inn a little longer while they try to sell the motorbike.
Dennis becomes convinced that Elina is involved with their father, and appears vaguely jealous, as he too has designs on Elina. He follows her down to the pier, where he sees her meet his father who has been hiding on a fishing boat called "Tara". Dennis confronts the elderly man, demanding to know whether he was responsible for planting a bomb in 1968 outside the Pentagon, which killed several innocent bystanders; he denies the charge. Reading from Malatesta's "Anarchy", he delivers an anarchist sermon to the enraptured Elina and the bemused Dennis. Bill, who has meanwhile confronted Jack at the Inn, and found him to be harmless, has fallen in love with Kate and wants to stay with her. But as the police close in, he borrows Kate's car to drive to the pier and escape with his father, while Dennis buys him some time by getting arrested in his place. Unable to leave, Bill returns to the Inn, embraces Kate, and gives himself up to the police.
Simple Men extends the aesthetic of Hartley's earlier work - from the hauntingly austere guitar music, to the economical cinematography, to the characters' subdued emotional register and even the way they seemingly move among one another as if choreographed. Although this texture is distinctly personal to Hartley, it can be seen as deriving from early moving pictures - an updated version of Buster Keaton's inherent fatalism and casually seismic actions. In the particularity of the character's revelations, in the witty orchestration of their interaction and their normally harmless "slapstick", Hartley's films wonderfully evoke the silent era.
Hartley is essentially an outsider with an incisive mentality, obsessed with animating the details and rhythms of suburban middle-class life. He "builds" emotions structurally rather than underlining them or expressing them virtuosically. There is a beautiful block-by-block construction in the steadily increasing tempos and repetitions of the escape midway through Simple Men, and in the film's wonderfully romantic ending. Bill, after deciding to run from the law drives right back into their net and the trust of Kate. The insistence of the cross-cut images - Bill's car, Kate's face, the cop reciting a typically "Hartleyesque" litany about love and existence - over the plaintive score escalates until it's practically overloaded.
"I want to look at things with a fresh angle so that the angle speaks, as (do) the words the people are saying in that angle." (Hal Hartley)
Filmically Hartley proceeds at a steady, graceful pace that fixates on the linking of movement from one image to another and locating sound at one degree below. Hartley's relationship/true-faith monologues tend to disengage from the elaborate spatial set-up, constantly reiterated in the visuals, which reveal a very contemporary insight - characters often pinned into corners or against walls, but they seem comfortable that way, retreating ever so slightly from a threatening world. Hartley and his remarkable Director of Photography Michael Spiller rigorously work the same carefully defined, two-or-three - point perspective within a shallow space (Hartley frequently shoots with Bresson's lens of choice, the 50mm), and punctuate it with sudden inserts. Their work has a zigzagging quality of movement that leaves a geometrically precise trail in the viewer's mind.
This explains the distinctive enigmatic "Hartleyesque" complexion, the product of an extreme perfectionist intelligence and meticulous preparation that culminates in such rich effects. There's a studied, accurate, impersonality to most of Hartley's films, a "semiliterate" form of addressing "problems between men and women", that feels like exactly what the director has claimed it to be: a series of observations carefully formulated in a notebook.
"Dangerous sincerity": this is the perfect encapsulation of a Hartley protagonist. The characteristic tension in his films, between misfits and the hostile contemporary culture through which they move is the confrontational focus which provides the fiercely intelligent dramatic spark. Hartley has an acute feel for the way people relate to their environment. His films principally offer a thorough re-imagination of the genre of American romantic comedy and its standard themes (trust, self-recognition through romantic attachment, redemption). It seems paradoxical that the extreme mechanization of Hartley's cinema really can re-invent a fundamentally autonomous style. But the rigid restrictions of movement, the feeling that no single character could walk more than twenty steps without stopping to think or experience some unnamed dread is thoroughly symptomatic of our current consciousness. Ultimately his films look fresher than most American cinema, with a glorious sense of light and air that is without parallel at the moment
"There aren't good endings or bad endings. There are only true endings and false endings" (Hal Hartley)
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