Imagine if Woody Allen, Whit Stillman, Kevin Smith and the Sundance Institute had a love child. This ungainly creature, speaking in witty, heightened, unnaturalistic sentences, and ambling, sometimes shambling between comedy, tragedy and pretension, might very well go on to make films that greatly resemble those of Hal Hartley.
Hartley is the man behind such beloved (at least by some) ‘90s indie films as “The Unbelievable Truth” and “Trust.” But to put him into proper context, we find ourselves casting around for parallels: he simply never made enough of a dent in mainstream sensibilities to be able to describe his work to a neophyte without reference to other, more overtly successful filmmakers. Or musicians, perhaps – if we play the equivalents game with the alt-rock explosion of the ‘90s, we get Quentin Tarantino as Nirvana, Jim Jarmusch as Sonic Youth and Kevin Smith as, maybe, Smashing Pumpkins (revered early on, but became a joke), and so perhaps Hal Hartley was The Breeders: promising, but never quite catching fire like those others, and sometimes guilty of adding up to less than the sum of its parts. Or wait, no, he’s Hüsker Dü, an adored-by-the-diehard-few college rock band who paved the way for the ‘90s alt-rock scene, only to be swept aside by those who attained greater success by making their sound just a little sweeter, by being just a little sexier.
But if Hartley is kind of unknown to mainstream film audiences (and even a lot of critics), he’s about as true a representation of the independent filmmaker as you can get. His debut was made for just $75,000 and the aforementioned Kevin Smith cited Hartley as a “major influence” on his comedic writing before he even started making movies. Amusingly, an aghast Hartley subsequently disavowed Smith and his films, but there are similarities. Hartley’s beyond-deadpan style features characters who talk in a self-reflexive, consciously philosophical manner and often his arch, playful examinations of relationships, desires and (failures of) communication play out like filmed stageplays. And yes, his films can be described as offbeat and quirky, frequently veering into intentionally pretentious territories. But the differences are telling, too. Probably central to both the distinctiveness of Hartley’s voice and his systematic lack of breakout success is that he, unlike Smith, for example, doesn’t seem overly interested in pop culture: he may experiment frequently with genre, but his filmic universes are entirely his own in tone, tenor and aesthetic; they refer to little outside themselves. And there’s a clipped, brisk rhythm to his work, embodied by actors as stonefaced as Buster Keaton and by a mise-en-scène often uncluttered to the point of emptiness.
As specific as he is, Hartley is resoundingly not for everyone and his style hasn’t always aged well, but he is very much an original. With his twelfth feature “Meanwhile” hitting in limited release today, February 29th (oddly appropriate that it’s a leap day, for such an off-kilter filmmaker), we thought it a good opportunity to run through his films. For some of us that meant a trip down memory lane (oh, college!), and for others the chance to discover the films fresh and unclouded by nostalgia, but for all of us, it was kind of a strange, downbeat blast. Here you go, then: the films of Hal Hartley. Long may they live, mainstream indifference be damned.
“The Unbelievable Truth” (1989)
Coming from nowhere at Sundance 1990, Hartley’s debut, “The Unbelieveable Truth,” was quite unlike anything else on screens at the time. It follows Audry (Adrienne Shelly) a recent high school grad and would-be model, who becomes infatuated with a mysterious ex-con mechanic (Robert John Burke), who, as the rumors around town go, is a murderer. In the context of the rest of Hartley’s career, it sometimes feels like a test-run or a sketch, principally for follow-up “Trust,” outlining early expressions of themes he’d later fill out more comprehensively. And it’s very much a product of the late 1980s, from Audry’s post-Cold War nuclear paranoia to her father’s Reaganite politics. But while it might not be as well-developed as later projects, it remains a delight, with the first demonstration of the intricately rhythmic, almost theatrical dialogue, full of wit and invention, that would come to characterise Hartley’s style. But while Hartley’s dialogue is what he is most known for, the film demonstrates that he had a keen visual eye from the first, with regular DoP Michael Spiller pulling in nice work on a meagre budget. It also marks the discovery of two figures who would feature heavily in Hartley’s later work: Shelly (the victim of a tragic killing in 2006, as she was completing her directorial debut “Waitress“) and Burke (who went on to TV roles in “Rescue Me” and “The Sopranos,” as well as, um, “Robocop 3” ), and both are superb — the former giving an indelible portrait of a girl adrift, no longer wanting the life she’s been heading for, the latter the film’s heart as the gentle soul with an undeniable violence inside him. Keep an eye out too for cameo-sized roles from Edie Falco and even “Meek’s Cutoff” director Kelly Reichardt. [B+]