Henry Fool

Henry Fool is on odd film. At heart it is a serious-minded effort that tackles a raft of themes from domestic violence to the vagaries of success in a refreshingly novel way but they are realized with a contrived and self-indulgent style that veers from wry black humour to gross-out comedy worthy of the Farrelly Brothers

Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) is an opportunistic drifter who fancies himself as the author of a volume of memoirs of great literary merit. One day he turns up in the life of Simon Grim (James Urbaniak), a withdrawn garbage man, who lives at home with his depressed mother (Maria Porter) and good-time-girl sister (Parker Posey). Convinced of the transformative value of ART, Henry encourages Simon to write and in a simple twist of fate Simon comes to he hailed as a literary figure for his times while Henry ends up in Simon’s dead-end job and married to his sister after he accidentally gets her pregnant,.

Hartley[s film is a Withnail And I  saga, another story of a self-styled genius and his diffident companion  which instead of taking us on a jolly jaunt through the countryside serves up its story with a side order of dysfunctional families, suicide and child abuse. Much like his 1995 film, Amateur, Had Hartley, who not only scripted and directed but wrote the music, played this for its evident dramatic substance rather than throwing it off-balance with various self-congratulatory flippancies this might have been the film it deserved to be.

 

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