Rage against the dying of the light, ya jagoff.
The therapist sits back in her chair. She reads the clipboard in front of her and some unknowable expression passes over her face. “Would you say that you think about death a lot?”
He hesitates. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Are you thinking about it right now?”
He looks away, then shrugs.
“In what way? Are you thinking about my death?”
“Somewhat.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not ideating or fantasizing about death. It just feels everpresent. There’s not enough time. For any of us.”
She leans forward. “Elaborate.”
“You’re fortyish, right?”
She squints, nods.
“So with average genes and some good fortune, that is thirty more years. With very good genes, fifty years. With crummy genes, death within the decade from a myriad of possible inherited sources. With tragedy, maybe it’s this week or later this year. But death is always there.“
She lifts her arm, elbow bent, points halfheartedly at the window. Through the blinds, the sun shines brightly, reflecting off of cars in the parking lot and the small fountain at the center of the plaza. “That is no way to go through life, though. A preoccupation with any idea can prevent a person from enjoying the time that they have. It is a nice day today, isn’t it?”
“But what about one’s calling? Doesn’t that dominate one’s life? Is a priest’s dedication to a god preventing them from enjoying their time?”
“You’re dissembling. Death isn’t your calling.”
He scratches at the stubble at his neck, unconvinced. “Yeah, I guess not.”
— “They Decamped for Hell,” Matthew Roberson
I’ve repeatedly spoken against the idea of the auteur theory of moviemaking while at the same time glorifying distinct voices like John Carpenter, Sofia Coppola, John Sayles, Wong Kar Wai, and now, Hal Hartley. In my defense, the director of a movie with a hundred-thousand dollar budget, who is also the composer and writer and editor and first-unit photographer and whose mother makes the sandwiches, has a larger influence on the finished product than someone like David Fincher, making a $100 million historical epic with a credited cast/crew of over 500 people and a giant streaming service mandating things like runtime and formatting. I think the directors above have themes that resonate across their entire filmographies (WKW: unrequited love and ennui; Carpenter: the insignificance of the individual when facing the power of nature or institutions; Coppola: isolation), as well as recurring character types and performers, favorite locations, and screenwriting habits. (Oh, the female lead of the new John Sayles movie is a single mother? YOU DON’T SAY. –Ed.)
Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool trilogy (Henry Fool; Fay Grim; Ned Rifle) is a weird, beautiful mess that orbits the titular Falstaffian buffoon. Thomas Jay Ryan’s Henry Fool is a singular weirdo and a force of nature, and I love how he is like a noisy plague descended upon the usual types of Hartley working-class characters. He burns every bridge around him and then floats on to a new place where he imposes, pontificates about his important work, smokes angrily, and repeats the process. In Henry Fool (1996), his appearance on Long Island upends the life of the Grim family, leading garbageman Simon (James Urbaniak) to become a prize-winning poet, rudderless Fay to marry Henry and birth his child Ned, and mother Mary to commit suicide. The film’s ending is rueful but expected, as we see how this con man’s schtick is effective even when he self-sabotages. He can’t help himself.
The sequel, Fay Grim, begins with Simon in jail for helping Henry to escape justice (he killed Kevin Corrigan’s character in self-defense at the end of the first movie). Fay and Ned are living comfortably thanks to the continued sales of Simon’s poetry, and the absence of Henry Fool from their lives seems a net positive. This is all a setup to a wonderful gag by Hartley: Henry Fool’s confessions, which are his bloated and sprawling autobiography scrawled across a dozen-odd notebooks, are actually valuable and Henry Fool is actually a world traveler with ties to shadowy organizations. The confessions are written in code and hold countless state secrets from Henry’s time in the CIA. And multiple governments are after these books that were once deemed worthless trash by the publisher in the first film.
To be frank, if given 100 guesses at where Fay Grim would go after the events of the first movie, I would have been wrong 100 times. But it is such a funny and clever way to take the story. The vagabond of the first movie is now a world criminal, and Fay of Long Island is coerced by the FBI into hunting down her ex-husband. It’s a spy thriller where the spy has no training or interest in the job. In fact, Fay only does this to get Simon out of jail and to track down Henry to seek closure. Well, that is what she tells herself; we the viewers can see that she’s still enthralled by the jowly imp in the three-piece suit.
But the spy stuff is just window dressing. We’re watching working-class people manipulated by publishers, by espionage agencies, by antigovernment groups, by a system that was built to exploit them and to punish them if they tried to rise above their station. And all of these forces and all of these lives are snagged on the thorny shell of Henry Fool, a man whose lust for life violates all of the social conventions and defies expectations . He leaves wreckage in his wake because all he can do is keep moving forward. Because to stop, at this point, is to die.
Despite my rational mind seeing Henry Fool as a pitiful figure living in the basement of a tchotchke shop in Istanbul, I have a small amount of jealousy for someone who lives that freely. Spouting philosophy while living like a bohemian, that was my shit for a long while. My wanderlust is subsumed into other needs and my conviction that I won’t live to see fifty has become less cute over time, to be frank. I want to see one hundred years old. That would be cool as hell. Maybe I’ll win the genetic lottery and get there. Or maybe AI will progress to the point where we upload our consciousness to a collective virtual reality and we live forever digitally (or at least until the money runs out). The future is unknown and unknowable, but we can’t all live with no regard for the past, the future, or those around us. We can enjoy ourselves every day but still work toward long-term goals. Anyone doing otherwise is a Fool.
Other 2006 candidates: Little Miss Sunshine; A Cock and Bull Story; Children of Men; The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada; Brokeback Mountain; Curse of the Golden Flower; Casino Royale
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.