Hal Hartely’s latest film, Fay Grim, picks up where Henry Fool left off ten years ago—that is, I have to assume it does. While I’m a big Hartley fan (or at least a fan of the artily self-conscious dialogue that he writes) I missed Fool. But all the cast members are back, reprising their roles and extending the story while revising both it and Hartley’s own milieu.

In the past, one could never really accuse a Hartley film of being over-plotted; but to be perfectly honest, having just completed my review of the latest Pirates movie, the thought of also synopsizing the equally plot- and exposition-heavy Fay Grim has me a little daunted. It’s that dense.

Henry Fool, an apparently miserable memoiricist and inadvertent killer, has disappeared somewhere in Europe and left his brother-in law Simon Grim holding the bag. The latter has been imprisoned, but has turned into an international poet-celebrity. Henry has also left his wife Fay in the lurch; she struggles to cope with a stigma that dogs her whole family, and her son in particular. She takes her maiden name once more, and tries to keep the bills paid by negotiating deals with Simon’s publisher. Now, it seems, Henry’s once-rejected journals have become hot publishing properties.

Why? Because it turns out that Henry was no fool—he was an International Man of Intrigue, and the CIA (amongst many other gun-toting, bomb-wielding parties) wants to get to the bottom of what secrets those journals may or may not contain. Thus does Fay Grim launch into her own globe-trotting adventure in search of Henry, the truth, and political relevancy.

Did I mention political relevancy? Hartley sure seems to, and that’s what’s really surprising in Fay Grim. In Hartley’s world, film is typically used to explore the ways in which people communicate—in insanely mundane yet interesting and humorous ways. Fay Grim, though, is less fey than it is grim due to the veneer of Homeland Security politics and narrative complexity that it wears like Fay’s overcoat.

This time out, though, the key to understanding Hartley appears not to be in his words but in his visual design. Almost all of his compositions are skewed, with off-horizontal parallel lines frequently dominating the shots. It’s as if he’s telling the audience: don’t sweat the details too much, look for parallels.

And for me, the parallels come together when the frame’s composition finally rights itself temporarily—and the parallel lines go completely vertical. One shot featuring Henry is juxtaposed with another featuring Simon, and the comparison being drawn seems to be this: that politicians and artists all merely masquerade or temporize as garbagemen, and that international intrigue is as much poetry as is film.

I think the same is probably true of Fay Grim. Most critics, even those friendly to Hartley, will probably relegate this film to the dustbin. But as with politics, there’s more to this film than meets the eye. I’m just not sure yet what it is.

Fay Grim is rated R “for language and some sexuality.” The sexuality is all strictly implied, if that concerns you—and is also mostly a plot device that’s abandoned once Fay reaches Turkey. Still, this is pretty definitely R material, though it’s far less potentially offensive than PG-13 fare like Norbit .

Courtesy of a regional publicist, Greg viewed a screener of Fay Grim.