The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley, 1989)

 

Adrienne Shelly in The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley, 1989)

Cast: Adrienne Shelly, Robert John Burke, Chris Cooke, Julia McNeal, Katherine Mayfield, Gary Sauer, Mark Chandler Bailey, David Healy, Matt Malloy, Edie Falco. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Carla Gerona. Film editing: Hal Hartley. Music: Jim Coleman.

In his debut feature, Hal Hartley adroitly mixes the old “stranger comes to town” story trope into a romantic comedy. The result has the DNA of Jim Jarmusch and Preston Sturges in it, but it’s all Hartley’s own, and it’s lovely. The film begins with a hitchhiker who finally gets a ride after repairing a broken-down car whose driver had earlier passed him up. Because the hitchhiker is dressed all in black, driver asks him if he’s a priest. (Not the last time someone will ask him that.) No, he says, but when he says that he’s been in prison, we see the car come to an abrupt stop and the man and his bag get tossed out of the car. It’s a harbinger of the numerous times in the film when the man in black, whose name is Joshua Hutton (Robert John Burke), will have to confront his past. When he finally arrives at his destination, his old home town, the first person he meets is a young woman named Pearl (Julia McNeal), who faints dead away at the sight of him. We learn that Joshua was sent to prison after he killed Pearl’s sister and her father. So he’s not really a stranger come to town, but he might as well be, since most of the town can’t quite remember what he was accused of – the gossips inflate it into some kind of mass murder. Eventually, we will find out the not-so-unbelievable truth of what Joshua did, but not before he falls in love with Audry Hugo (Adrienne Shelly), who helps him get a job in her father’s auto repair shop. It’s a droll romance, complicated by the fact that Audry walks around in a gloomy funk, convinced that the world is about to end in a nuclear holocaust. Burke and Shelly play their roles with a kind of deadpan that serves as a foil to the emotional volatility that surrounds them. There’s Audry’s father, Vic (Chris Cooke), whose hilarious exasperation with her is reminiscent of William Demarest’s outbursts in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944). There’s her ex-boyfriend, Mike (Mark Chandler Bailey), who is so infuriated at being dumped by her that he gets into shoving matches with almost every man he suspects of being a rival. But the film would be nothing without Hartley’s ability to skew every turn in the plot or action of his characters in a direction just a few degrees off what we expect. It’s a sly, loopy gem of a movie.