Film

Henry Fool (1997)

Director: Hal Hartley

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Looser, more expansive and certainly more scatological than Hartley's earlier work, this very funny, finally touching fable focuses on the way Henry Fool (Ryan) - a bawdy, rebellious, intellectually gifted drifter, and quite possibly a charlatan - transforms the lives of the inhabitants of a small town: notably, shy, put-upon Simon Grim (Urbaniak), who under Fool's auspices becomes both celebrated as a writer and demonised as a pornographer; his promiscuous sister (Posey) and depressive mother (Porter). For all its outrageous black humour, however, it remains a Hartley movie, with its wittily stylised dialogue, droll performances, crisp camerawork and its profoundly ironic musings on the nature of art and its status in society - musings which surely reflect on Hartley's own status as an ambitious but marginalised film-maker.

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