**/****
starring Parker Posey, Jeff Goldblum, James Urbaniak, Saffron Burrows
written and directed by Hal Hartley
by Bill Chambers Those hoping this unexpected sequel to the terrific Henry Fool will be a Before Sunset should brace themselves for a Texasville. I think the problem is not that Parker Posey can't carry a picture (Posey's more of a movie star than she is a character actor, after all, so inflexible is her neurotic persona), but that her Fay Grim can't carry a picture. In that sense, Fay Grim is a little bit like a highbrow Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, with virtually everyone from Henry Fool returning to lend satellite support to a spastic cipher who was at best a beard for the subsumed homoeroticism at that film's epicentre. Reinventing Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan, limited to a powerhouse cameo) as an international man of mystery (thereby re-inflating his punctured ego, which maddeningly annuls Henry Fool), the movie jets single-mother Fay all over the globe in search of her estranged husband, whose once-derided memoir--sought after by the publishing world now that Henry has become a fugitive, natch--might actually be an encrypted document that poses a threat to National Security. Timely where the first film was timeless (THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER's Michael Rechtshaffen succinctly called it "a seriocomic Syriana"), Fay Grim is a constant, fatiguing toggle between obnoxious quirk and Al-Jazeera. Put simply, everybody's trying too hard--or should that be not hard enough? PROGRAMME: Special Presentations
