kleph
10-04-2006, 10:45 PM
The early 90s was an exciting time to be into independent movies in a city large enough to have a several theatres that showed them. The first few years of the decade saw the emergence of a vibrant group of young filmmakers that included Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Gus Van Sant, Whit Stillman and Steven Soderbergh. It seemed like every week there was another great film showing somewhere.
But the director that most captured my imagination was Hal Hartley. To this day I will go see a film just because of his name is on it. Sadly, most folks outside of the independent film scene in the US have never heard of the guy, and that’s a serious tragedy.
Trust was the first film of Hartley’s I saw and it was so different and fresh in comparison to anything else I had ever seen that, when it was over I went directly to the box office, bought another ticket and went back inside and watched it again.
The film’s tagline is “A slightly twisted comedy” but that certainly does little to prepare you for the film you get. It’s a very funny film but nobody in it smiles even once during its full 107 minutes. They do smoke, though. A lot.
Maria (Adrianna Shelly) is a vapid high school bimbo doing well on mindless cruise control. This traquility lasts about 20 seconds into the film and, by the end of the first half hour, her life has completely fallen apart. She announces she is pregnant to her family and is thrown out the house. She slaps her father who promptly falls down dead. Her quarterback boyfriend dumps her, a shopkeeper tries to rape her and she witnesses a child’s abduction.
She seeks refuge in an abandoned house and a six-pack of beer where she meets Matthew (Martin Donovan) – a bitter misanthrope whose life has reached a low drone of agony he fills with esoteric books, scotch and Beethoven. If her life has fallen apart, his has been broken for some time. He lives with his abusive father, can’t hold a job despite his prodigious technical skill and keeps a hand grenade in his pocket to provide him a quick end to everything he is forced to endure.
The story is then how these two try and put some order in their lives and, maybe, just maybe, try and forge a relationship of their own. But its tough when the best substitute they can find for love is respect and admiration. Trust might not even be possible for two people who have worked so long to protect themselves from the world around them.
Despite their wounds and exhaustion, they haven’t given up and resigned themselves to the tepid horror of the mundane limbo they forced to live in; given up on themselves and turned on the fellow inmates like everyone else. Yet.
"Initially I just wanted to tell the story of these people who are really screwed up," Hartley explained in a review at the time. "How damaged can a person be before they manage to make themselves whole again? The suburban environment, it's not too important. Landscape doesn't damage people. Architecture doesn't damage people. People damage people."
But the landscape isn’t helping much. Trust is set in suburban Long Island. And despite its emptiness here, Hartly depicts it as one of the most frightening places on earth.
“The setting is a cross between Beaver Cleaver's home town and a minimum-security prison,” wrote Washington Post reviewer Hal Hinson. “It's a sort of suburban gulag where quiet desperation rules until someone goes haywire and all hell breaks loose.”
Hard to believe this actual place was the breeding ground for one of America’s most dynamic and independent filmmakers. Since debuting as a feature film director in 1989, Hal Hartley has blazed a firmly independent trail in cinema. Little wonder since Hartley himself came to film from a completely different direction than most. He attended the Massachusetts College of Art, but in 1980 he transferred to SUNY Purchase, where he studied film under the noted director-editor Aram Avakian. The experience there was critical for his development as an artists, he said.
“What really distinguishes Purchase, and makes it one of the most important film schools in the country, is its position as a working class film school,” Hartley explains. “It's the only place where blue collar, lower middle class kids can go to study film.”
Trust was his second feature film and does show it in many scenes. While Hartley is very sure of what he is trying to say there are points in the film it is apparent he is not sure how to quite yet. But his intuition does him very good. Hartley has clearly did a lot of preparation in making this film and it carries him through the rough spots.
Let’s be honest here, one reason the film struck such a strong chord with me was, as a fucked-up 20-something trying to piece together my identity, I really empathized with the film’s pair of fucked up 20-somethings trying to piece together who they are. For a long time I had felt I was completely different than anyone around me. Nobody like my music, nobody like my books, nobody even talked like me, for chrissakes. Walking out of the theater after seeing Trust the first time I knew, for the very first time, the truth – I wasn’t different, I was simply in exile.
But that’s not why it still resonates for me all these years later. Once you allow yourself to accept the dramatically different style of storytelling - the arbitrary event is very much the rule here - there is one thing that really strikes you about Hartley’s films and Trust in particular – their innate humanity. There is something touching about Maria and Matthew's relationship even though its outcome is inevitable. But that's OK too because Hartley is keely aware that a sense of understanding the world begins with understanding ourselves and, sometimes, that is the hardest task of all.
Because Hartley, despite his exploration of the absurd, is not an escapist. His films address the world around us, not fantasy. That puts him at odds with the Hollywood approach that provides little other than blockbuster action films and their tawdry brand of escapism.
“When I would go to see a Hollywood film, I wouldn't see anything about my life,” he once told an interviewer. “But then I would see a Preston Sturges film, which was made fifty years ago, and say this is about my life. But that was Hollywood in a different era.”
Where the films shine brightest is in the dialogue. Reading a Hartley screenplay is a joy because of the crisp use of the language like in exchanges like this:
Maria: Can you stop watching TV for a moment?
Matthew: No.
Maria: Why?
Matthew: I had a bad day. I had to subvert my principles and kowtow to an idiot. Television makes these daily sacrifices possible. It deadens the inner core of my being.
Maria: Let's move away, then.
Matthew: They have television everywhere. There's no escape. And besides, you won't leave your mother.
It’s the type of banter you find yourself racing to keep track of and being thoroughly delighted at the chase. Because in Hartley’s films the words are more than what you have have come to expect from dialogue in Hollywood films where they just placeholders for action or a shortcut to explain the thin plot.
“Dialog is visual, imagistic,” Hartley explains. “Before I had a computer, I literally cut and pasted dialog, putting the words in different configurations on the page. This was the most immediate method of studying the rhythmic aspect of scenes.”
But Hartley doesn’t let the words do all the work. His hyper-stylized approach as well as his budget (Trust was made for $700,000 and only took in slightly more than $350,000 in its initial run in the theaters.) required the use of extensive rehearsals. The actors went over the lines until they knew exactly how to deliver them to perfection. More importantly, they learned where not to deliver them. It is rare to see a movie where silences speak as loudly as any word uttered throughout the course of the film.
“Under Hartley's direction, Shelly and Donovan invent an acting style for a genre that appears to have materialized out of nowhere,” wrote Terrence Rafferty in The New Yorker's review of the film.
All of the supporting actors, John McCay as Matthew’s father, Meritt Nelson as Maria’s sister and Edie Falco, with a wicked lady McBeth style turn as Maria’s mother, are superb. In an era where the thin blond actress is all you see on the TV and in movies it is a relief to see a film full of normal looking people who can actually act.
After Trust, Hartley continued on his independent track making more complex films for small audiences. His examination of relationships and the landmine of interpersonal relationships remained a strong theme grounding his films while his style became more and more esoteric. The acme of this phase was 1997’s wonderful Henry Fool (although the hour-long short Surviving Desire he did for American Playhouse remains my favorite of all his works)
Since then, Hartley has become more introspective and experimental and his themes have widened to address more universal topics. This transition has alienated a lot of his original fans and, I have to admit, I don’t have the affinity for his recent films as much as his earlier works.
But, I can’t criticize the man for it. From the point of view of the artist, moving on and reinventing yourself is not just an option – it’s a matter of survival.
“A person grows,” he said in a recent interview. “And you have to go where the work dictates you go, even if it’s sad to leave behind what you feel to be a receptive audience of people.”
This essay also appears on my website kleph.com (http://www.kleph.com).
© 2006 C.J. Schexnayder
But the director that most captured my imagination was Hal Hartley. To this day I will go see a film just because of his name is on it. Sadly, most folks outside of the independent film scene in the US have never heard of the guy, and that’s a serious tragedy.
Trust was the first film of Hartley’s I saw and it was so different and fresh in comparison to anything else I had ever seen that, when it was over I went directly to the box office, bought another ticket and went back inside and watched it again.
The film’s tagline is “A slightly twisted comedy” but that certainly does little to prepare you for the film you get. It’s a very funny film but nobody in it smiles even once during its full 107 minutes. They do smoke, though. A lot.
Maria (Adrianna Shelly) is a vapid high school bimbo doing well on mindless cruise control. This traquility lasts about 20 seconds into the film and, by the end of the first half hour, her life has completely fallen apart. She announces she is pregnant to her family and is thrown out the house. She slaps her father who promptly falls down dead. Her quarterback boyfriend dumps her, a shopkeeper tries to rape her and she witnesses a child’s abduction.
She seeks refuge in an abandoned house and a six-pack of beer where she meets Matthew (Martin Donovan) – a bitter misanthrope whose life has reached a low drone of agony he fills with esoteric books, scotch and Beethoven. If her life has fallen apart, his has been broken for some time. He lives with his abusive father, can’t hold a job despite his prodigious technical skill and keeps a hand grenade in his pocket to provide him a quick end to everything he is forced to endure.
The story is then how these two try and put some order in their lives and, maybe, just maybe, try and forge a relationship of their own. But its tough when the best substitute they can find for love is respect and admiration. Trust might not even be possible for two people who have worked so long to protect themselves from the world around them.
Despite their wounds and exhaustion, they haven’t given up and resigned themselves to the tepid horror of the mundane limbo they forced to live in; given up on themselves and turned on the fellow inmates like everyone else. Yet.
"Initially I just wanted to tell the story of these people who are really screwed up," Hartley explained in a review at the time. "How damaged can a person be before they manage to make themselves whole again? The suburban environment, it's not too important. Landscape doesn't damage people. Architecture doesn't damage people. People damage people."
But the landscape isn’t helping much. Trust is set in suburban Long Island. And despite its emptiness here, Hartly depicts it as one of the most frightening places on earth.
“The setting is a cross between Beaver Cleaver's home town and a minimum-security prison,” wrote Washington Post reviewer Hal Hinson. “It's a sort of suburban gulag where quiet desperation rules until someone goes haywire and all hell breaks loose.”
Hard to believe this actual place was the breeding ground for one of America’s most dynamic and independent filmmakers. Since debuting as a feature film director in 1989, Hal Hartley has blazed a firmly independent trail in cinema. Little wonder since Hartley himself came to film from a completely different direction than most. He attended the Massachusetts College of Art, but in 1980 he transferred to SUNY Purchase, where he studied film under the noted director-editor Aram Avakian. The experience there was critical for his development as an artists, he said.
“What really distinguishes Purchase, and makes it one of the most important film schools in the country, is its position as a working class film school,” Hartley explains. “It's the only place where blue collar, lower middle class kids can go to study film.”
Trust was his second feature film and does show it in many scenes. While Hartley is very sure of what he is trying to say there are points in the film it is apparent he is not sure how to quite yet. But his intuition does him very good. Hartley has clearly did a lot of preparation in making this film and it carries him through the rough spots.
Let’s be honest here, one reason the film struck such a strong chord with me was, as a fucked-up 20-something trying to piece together my identity, I really empathized with the film’s pair of fucked up 20-somethings trying to piece together who they are. For a long time I had felt I was completely different than anyone around me. Nobody like my music, nobody like my books, nobody even talked like me, for chrissakes. Walking out of the theater after seeing Trust the first time I knew, for the very first time, the truth – I wasn’t different, I was simply in exile.
But that’s not why it still resonates for me all these years later. Once you allow yourself to accept the dramatically different style of storytelling - the arbitrary event is very much the rule here - there is one thing that really strikes you about Hartley’s films and Trust in particular – their innate humanity. There is something touching about Maria and Matthew's relationship even though its outcome is inevitable. But that's OK too because Hartley is keely aware that a sense of understanding the world begins with understanding ourselves and, sometimes, that is the hardest task of all.
Because Hartley, despite his exploration of the absurd, is not an escapist. His films address the world around us, not fantasy. That puts him at odds with the Hollywood approach that provides little other than blockbuster action films and their tawdry brand of escapism.
“When I would go to see a Hollywood film, I wouldn't see anything about my life,” he once told an interviewer. “But then I would see a Preston Sturges film, which was made fifty years ago, and say this is about my life. But that was Hollywood in a different era.”
Where the films shine brightest is in the dialogue. Reading a Hartley screenplay is a joy because of the crisp use of the language like in exchanges like this:
Maria: Can you stop watching TV for a moment?
Matthew: No.
Maria: Why?
Matthew: I had a bad day. I had to subvert my principles and kowtow to an idiot. Television makes these daily sacrifices possible. It deadens the inner core of my being.
Maria: Let's move away, then.
Matthew: They have television everywhere. There's no escape. And besides, you won't leave your mother.
It’s the type of banter you find yourself racing to keep track of and being thoroughly delighted at the chase. Because in Hartley’s films the words are more than what you have have come to expect from dialogue in Hollywood films where they just placeholders for action or a shortcut to explain the thin plot.
“Dialog is visual, imagistic,” Hartley explains. “Before I had a computer, I literally cut and pasted dialog, putting the words in different configurations on the page. This was the most immediate method of studying the rhythmic aspect of scenes.”
But Hartley doesn’t let the words do all the work. His hyper-stylized approach as well as his budget (Trust was made for $700,000 and only took in slightly more than $350,000 in its initial run in the theaters.) required the use of extensive rehearsals. The actors went over the lines until they knew exactly how to deliver them to perfection. More importantly, they learned where not to deliver them. It is rare to see a movie where silences speak as loudly as any word uttered throughout the course of the film.
“Under Hartley's direction, Shelly and Donovan invent an acting style for a genre that appears to have materialized out of nowhere,” wrote Terrence Rafferty in The New Yorker's review of the film.
All of the supporting actors, John McCay as Matthew’s father, Meritt Nelson as Maria’s sister and Edie Falco, with a wicked lady McBeth style turn as Maria’s mother, are superb. In an era where the thin blond actress is all you see on the TV and in movies it is a relief to see a film full of normal looking people who can actually act.
After Trust, Hartley continued on his independent track making more complex films for small audiences. His examination of relationships and the landmine of interpersonal relationships remained a strong theme grounding his films while his style became more and more esoteric. The acme of this phase was 1997’s wonderful Henry Fool (although the hour-long short Surviving Desire he did for American Playhouse remains my favorite of all his works)
Since then, Hartley has become more introspective and experimental and his themes have widened to address more universal topics. This transition has alienated a lot of his original fans and, I have to admit, I don’t have the affinity for his recent films as much as his earlier works.
But, I can’t criticize the man for it. From the point of view of the artist, moving on and reinventing yourself is not just an option – it’s a matter of survival.
“A person grows,” he said in a recent interview. “And you have to go where the work dictates you go, even if it’s sad to leave behind what you feel to be a receptive audience of people.”
This essay also appears on my website kleph.com (http://www.kleph.com).
© 2006 C.J. Schexnayder