Review

The official sequel to Hartley’s 1997 film, Henry Fool, Fay Grim picks up where that one left off, employing the same set of zany characters. However, this is not to say that you need to have seen the first film to enjoy the new one. Fay Grim stands as its own piece of madcap mayhem, offering five minutes of exposition before launching into an adventure of wacky insanity. It has been eight years since Henry Fool fled the country, leaving behind his wife, Fay, and child, Ned, to pick up the pieces of their lives. When Ned gets expelled from school for bringing in a pornographic toy that he mysteriously received in the mail, Fay turns to her brother Simon, a successful garbage man-turned-poet serving a ten-year prison sentence for aiding in Henry’s escape. Due to a series of bizarre encounters Simon has with visitors, he now believes that Henry’s “masterwork,” once thought to be a pretentious piece of fake autobiographical fiction, is actually a secret report, encoded to hide information pertaining to several spy organizations around the world. This, coupled with the urging of CIA special agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum), sends Fay on a whirlwind, action-packed journey to Paris to retrieve Henry’s novel and possibly his love. Hartley is in fine form here; boasting a cast of outrageous characters and an incredibly clever dry wit, Fay Grim turns convention (and its predecessor) on its head to produce an entertaining odyssey through the imagination of a cinematic genius.

 -- Michael Lerman