Simple Men (Hal Hartley, 1992)

Robert John Burke and Bill Sage in Simple Men

Cast: Robert John Burke, Bill Sage, Karen Sillas, Elina Löwensohn, Martin Donovan, Mark Chandler Bailey, Chris Cooke, Jeffrey Howard, Holly Marie Combs, Joe Stevens, Damian Young, Marietta Marich, John MacKay. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Daniel Ouellette. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. Music: Yo La Tengo, Hal Hartley. 

When does style become mannerism? As I work my way chronologically through the Criterion Channel's Hal Hartley retrospective, I find myself beginning to ask that question. Because Simple Men seems to me to show some slight atrophy in the deadpan, off-beat style that Hartley established in his first films, a kind of predictable unpredictability, if you will. We sense that nothing in the movie will turn out quite right, that it may not even end but just stop. Granted, I'm comfortable with the eccentricity of Hartley's narrative and characters, and I laughed out loud at several points in the film. I particularly enjoyed, for example, the character of the sheriff of the small Long Island town where the protagonists, as usual in Hartley's films, wind up. Played by Damian Young, the sheriff is a kind of walking thesaurus, a cynical, irritable officer of the law who delights in parsing what's said to him into an endless string of mocking synonyms. And I enjoyed the irruption of a musical number into the story, as the players dance to Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing." But it also felt like a needed break in the slow plod of the narrative. With his earlier films I felt that Hartley was challenging us with some ideas about family and relationships. Simple Men hinges on a family situation, two brothers in search of their father, and there are budding relationships, Bill (Robert John Burke) with Kate (Karen Sillas) and Dennis (Bill Sage) with Elina (Elina Löwensohn), but they are so abstractly conceived that it's hard to get involved in them. At its worst, which is mercifully not very often, Simple Men seems to be an exercise in quirk for quirk's sake.