Simple Men

Like Mr. Hartley's other movies, this film manages to balance humor, romance, drama, emotion, and action. It has a vaguely surreal air to it, wherein the events are plausible, but could only happen on those strange, unsettled days of the year when the sky can't decide whether to rain or not. There is also a bit of camp mixed in.

Also like his other films, Simple Men is quite idealistic, yet without being sappy or 'feel-good' in a cheap or simplistic way. This is a subtle movie, and I found I had to watch it a second and third time before I truly appreciated it. It's hard to compare it to anything else except Hartley's other movies, especially the excellent Henry Fool. I recommend it highly.

On first viewing, I could have sworn this was a Sam Shepard play. It has the short lilting dialogue for much of the film and sounds as though it were written for the stage. It is directed very much in that fashion and is a fascinating, captivating set of performances...understated and full of deeper meanings that don't shout at you in the more typical "Hollywood" tradition!

It's like somebody took a piece of classic cinema and emphasized just how ridiculous and surreal every cliché and stereotype really is. Hal Hartley does a masterful job of giving a classic film narrative a fresh perspective with a hilariously sharp, convoluted, wild and gripping screenplay directed in a style that appears reminiscent of the French New Wave. Loaded with unabashedly random monologues, hysterically quotable moments and a beautifully chaotic plot, this film is certainly a classic in its own right.

There's Hollywood, there's Dogma... and there's Hal Hartley. The absurd storyline of "Simple Men" reminded me of Pedro Almodóvar, it's visual impact made me think of Hitchcock's suburban nightmares like "Shadow of a doubt" or "The trouble with Harry". It's either a deeply philosophical movie which raises many questions (without providing the answers), or some sort of grotesque (Elina Lowensohn's performance!), depending on how you look at it. "Simple men" is one of those movies which leave you with the impression that there was more than met the eye, and maybe there was. Above all, it's an unusual, tranquil and highly entertaining film with very likeable characters.

This movie is amazing. In a lot of ways it is an extremely painful movie to watch, watching people create their own destruction, watching the action play out a certain inevitability. But it's different also from a lot of stories, in that this kind of arc does not just continue on to its logical conclusion. The characters do not simply hurtle forth, but are always capable of thinking, changing. Really, really good.