Henry Fool and Other Random Thoughts
I recently rewatched Henry Fool, a Hal Hartley movie made in 1997. I hadn’t watched it for about 10 years, but it held up the second time around. I read some other reviews that complained the movie was too long and lost momentum toward the end, and I agree that it was protracted and the first half of the film is definitely stronger than the last. It’s still well worth watching, in my opinion, because it’s original and a million times better than most of the derivative crap that the mainstream movie industry spits out.
Henry Fool has some nice dark humor in it. First of all, the name is brilliant. Henry Fool. It’s a name that mocks its owner and immediately makes you wonder, “What kind of person would have a name like that?” I know giving characters names that describe their personality traits is a far from new concept. For instance, it was used in The Water Babies, a book I read to my son awhile ago. There was a woman called Ms. Bedonebyasyoudid. I know, that’s a mouthful. But it’s the same thing, and that book was written in the mid 1800s. I thought Hartley used the name trope to very good effect again when he named a xenophobic politician “Owen Fear.” He uses these names to describe characters without being too heavy handed with it.
The other main characters are the siblings Simon and Fay Grimm, 20 somethings living with their mother in New Jersey. Henry Fool emerges out of the blue, a man in his late 20s who seems like he might have come from another century with his shoulder length brown hair. He’s a vagrant, unemployed person, but he’s always nattily dressed in a gray vest suit with a clean white shirt underneath.
Henry decides to rent a room in Simon and Fay Grimms’ basement, and he just walks into their lives, literally, walking right down to the basement, opening the door, and lighting the furnace like he already lives there. Simon reads Henry’s name, written in old fashioned cursive, on the luggage label of his suitcase and Henry says, “Centuries ago it had an ‘e’ at the end.” That’s my favorite line in the movie. It’s brilliant dark humor. There’s never a mention of the fact that Fool is not an enviable last name. Instead, Henry seems to take pride in it.
Henry Fool appeals to me because in some ways I feel like I’ve known him, like I’ve met him somewhere before. Someone maudlin and mawkish, who takes himself too seriously. Henry talks of his great work, his poetics, and carries mysterious composition books that he says contain his magnum opus. Yet it’s Simon Grimm, the unassuming garbage man who works compacting trash, who ends up being the brilliant poet, while Henry’s book, when he finally allows others to read it, is “really quite bad” (in the words of Simon’s publisher). But Henry is likable because he’s so flawed and so relentlessly sincere, if misguided.
This movie has a definite nostalgia factor for me. It was made in a time before cell phones, when computers weren’t in everyone’s houses and a lot of people didn’t even have the internet. It’s strange, because it wasn’t that long ago. I mean, I remember 1996. I was 13/14 years old. But how things have changed in the past 24 years! It was a different world. People seem more present, more in the moment, not looking at a screen all the time. Ther are no ever-present cell phones everyone is ready to pull out at any moment to absent themselves from reality.
I wonder, how many people now still write bad autobiographies in composition books? I’d being willing to wager not as many do anymore. Now everyone has a blog, or vlog, which don’t get me wrong, can be an effective form of self expression, but it’s less personal.
Life seems less hectic in the nineties world of Henry Fool, and more attention is given to the small moments, little things in the composition or the surroundings. When Simon Grimm takes his work breaks, for instance, he just goes and sits on some concrete steps and has a beer. Maybe he reads a book. What would he be doing now? Probably scrolling through his cell phone, checking Facebook or looking things up on Google. The imageof a guy looking at his cell phone is somehow less picturesque than that of a man sitting there just drinking a beer.
And damn they smoked a lot in this movie. I guess that’s one thing not to be nostalgic about. Smoking has really gone out of style since the 90′s, partly because people can’t smoke inside most places anymore, and also because a lot of people have figured out that while smoking might look momentarily cool and glamorous at 21, there’s nothing glamorous about COPD, emphysema, or lung cancer, which, let’s face it, is what every consistent smoker is headed for.
Parker Posy plays Fay Grimm, Simon’s sister, and she seamlessly becomes her character. I like Parker Posy. She also gives me the feeling, like Henry Fool, that I could have known her, or known someone like her. She’s plays the bitchy, slutty older sister, a character not unlike the one she played in Dazed and Confused.
I do think Henry Fool lost direction towards the end. The character of Simon Grimm could have been developed more. He always remains the mysterious, taciturn poet, the sort of idiot savant. I did watch at least one of the other films in the Henry Fool trilogy (or both? I can’t remember). As I recall, the movie Fay Grimm wasn’t nearly as good. Hartley lost his momentum somehow.
In all, I very much enjoyed rewatching Henry Fool, despite it’s flaws. I think it has a lot of heart and flashes of brilliance. I like the humor in it, and the way Hartley portrays the dismal everdayness of the characters’ lives. I think it’s harder now to observe and create, with so many distractions and so many things to experience and take in: videos on YouTube, hundreds of movies and shows to stream from around the world, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pokemon Go, Apps and games, news articles popping up each morning on my IPhone screen, e-books. I could distract myself with these things day and night. I hardly have time to create or look at stuff anyway because I have two small children to take care of, so just getting to be online writing down these asinine thoughts about Henry Fool is a luxury for me.
The character of Henry Fool inspires me to continue writing my own poetics, no matter how bad, just as he inpired Simon Grimm. Henry is a creative force, a muse, and maybe we should all be brazen and foolish enough to have a great “life’s work.” There’s something charming about that.
