"The Long Island-bred [Hal] Hartley is trying to shake up his aesthetic - shake it up without forsaking his gift for deadpan comedy and loopy little playlets in which misfits reach out clumsily from their solipsistic bubbles," writes David Edelstein in New York. "In Fay Grim, he deposits the characters he has already created (and the actors he adores) into an up-to-the-minute, labyrinthine paranoid-conspiracy thriller like Syriana, so that those solipsistic bubbles are burst by the brutality of modern geopolitics. It's a rich idea - a Hartley-esque variation on the theme of American Innocents Abroad. And it works superbly until - well, Grim's the word."

"Hartley didn't merely direct this film," notes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "He also wrote, edited, and co-produced it, and apparently tried to cram into it everything that has consumed or appalled him in the years since Henry Fool. If the movie kept pace with Fay's bafflement, all might have been well, and I was happy to hear Jeff Goldblum reel off reams of political paranoia at dazzling speed, like a court official in a Gilbert and Sullivan song. What happens, though, and what lures the film into disaster, is that Hartley lets slip his sense of humor (always his strongest asset) and begins to believe his own plot."

Updated.

Posted by: dwhudson    Source

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