Review

Can a lying con man be a mentor to a repressed sanitation worker? Henry Fool (Ryan) rents a room in the unhappy household of Simon Grim (Urbaniak), a young man ridiculed by clinically depressed mom Mary (Porter), slutty sister Fay (Posey) and an assortment of neighborhood toughs. Henry assumes control of these lives teetering between pointlessness and dispair, mixing unabashed admiration for Simon's poetry with tales of high adventure in South American jungles. Resistance to Henry's influence is never a consideration for Simon, whose unabating sense of futility is for once pushed aside by glimmerings of self-worth. Bringing his characters to the edge of caricature, director Hartley uses their particular idiosynchracies to make broader statements about American cultural anomalities, As the protagonists blindly grope for purpose and meaning, the film's tone shifts from cerebral detachment to uncomfortable menace as Hartley crafts another sly exploration of human relation and individual salvation.