Hartley's No Such Thing

Some filmmakers you just don't get. Other people adore them and are willing to spend great effort explaining why you should, too. You sit there and listen, you watch another of the director's movies and you still don't respond. Which leaves you with two choices: chalk it up to a difference in taste and move on, or offer your own reasons why the other guy is wrong. I'm going with option 2, because the filmmaker is Hal Hartley, the amazingly prolific and polarizing Long Island filmmaker whose latest, No Such Thing, a satirical drama about science, religion and tv news, opens Friday.

I love the idea of Hartley, and I admire his independence, his stubbornness and his refusal to go Hollywood, but I don't like his movies. (I like the idea of Frank Zappa, too, but I don't enjoy listening to his music.) The only film of Hartley's that I loved enough to see again was Henry Fool, an uncharacteristically warm, shaggy, sprawling drama that struck me as somewhat of a departure from his usual mode: cool, neat and tight. My problem with Hartley is the same problem I have with much of Woody Allen, Whit Stillman, David Mamet, Kevin Smith and other filmmakers whose work is built mainly around dialogue. (Let's call them the Dialogue Lovers, or DLs.) There's a difference between creativity and uniformity, and the DLs sometimes appear to mistake one for the other.

Creativity means maintaining control over a movie while letting every individual part of it fill in as richly as possible; the goal is to make every part of the film as distinctive and arresting as the dialogue, even if it means making serious adjustments in what you've decided to call your "vision." The greatest American filmmakers?Altman, Spielberg, Scorsese, Stone?are willing to adjust their visions. They make stylistically strong movies that share certain signature traits, but each one is so distinctive that you can't simply swap out one for another. If you're in the mood to watch Raging Bull again, The Age of Innocence, a fine film in its own right, just won't do. If, on the other hand, you feel like watching Husbands and Wives and it's not available, you can probably make do with Deconstructing Harry, because if you stay within a certain period (say, the 70s or the early 90s), Allen doesn't adjust his vision much from film to film?at least not as boldly as Scorsese and the other giants I mentioned do. (If you asked me whether that makes Allen a lesser artist than Scorsese, I'd have to reluctantly say, "Yes.")

Mamet, Smith, Hartley and the rest of the DLs seem reluctant to change, grow and transform themselves (though Mamet's gotten a lot better in recent years). If a filmmaker pursues this strategy at the expense of risk and change, audiences might be tempted to decide if they've seen one, they've seen 'em all. Which is exactly what I thought after enduring No Such Thing.

No Such Thing is about a tv news assistant named Beatrice (Sarah Polley, controlled and haunting as usual) who goes looking for her missing boyfriend, who was part of a camera crew that went to Iceland to investigate reports of a horrible rampaging beast. The film is a meditation on fairytales and myths; Beatrice and the horned, foulmouthed, hard-drinking Monster?amusingly played under heavy makeup by Hartley regular Robert John Burke?are clearly intended as modern equivalents of Beauty and the Beast, as well as a twist on the Frankenstein story (science run amok).

No Such Thing is also a satire of some kind, but of what? On everything, it seems?science, politics, the media. (The Monster is driven into a cranky frenzy by all the tv and radio chatter in the atmosphere; apparently his head is a Direct TV dish, and he wants Beatrice to take him to a fearsome scientist who can tell him how to end his pain.) The media wants to use the Monster to boost ratings; science wants him to study, torture or neutralize; the Monster just wants to end his own suffering. (He's basically indestructible, which means suicide isn't really an option.)

On paper, the whole thing sounds interesting, but No Such Thing is unfortunately one of those kinds of movies that makes you feel as though somebody glued tiny lead pellets to the tips of your eyelashes; between the flat compositions, the monotonously similar performances and the droning wistful music on the soundtrack, I had to pinch myself a couple of times to keep from dozing. Hartley has so many targets, and takes such condescending and ignorant shots at them, that the film accumulates no force. It just floats from scene to scene, letting stiff, hyper-alert actors play the usual wind-up Hartley characters rattling off the usual arch, snappy but crushingly expositional Hartley dialogue while moving through the usual dull compositions blocked in the usual Hartley manner (i.e., as if we're watching a stage play).

With Hartley, as with many of the DLs, you suspect that if you wrote every character's dialogue on notebook paper in chronological order and read it all aloud, you'd have a short story that sounds as if it's being told by one person. When each character sounds pretty much like every other character, and much of what's coming out of their mouths is exposition, you're not looking at a drama, you're listening to narration delivered by an ensemble cast. ("There's a world of bad news out there, ladies and gentlemen," says Beatrice's network news boss, a cliched, chainsmoking hardcase played by Helen Mirren?a line that manages to oversimplify tv news, chew the audience's food for them and deny the character any humanity, all at the same time.)

The film opens with the Monster in his lair, announcing, "I'm not the Monster I used to be." The images are lit and framed as if you're about to see some kind of downtown performance-art piece. This might be a good joke if it weren't so reductive, and if you didn't suspect Hartley thought it out theatrically because that's the only way he's comfortable thinking. Except for the great Julie Christie's brief turn in a thankless part as a good doctor (she can make you smile just by leaning on her fist while she listens to another actor), there's nothing onscreen luminous enough to take your mind off everything that's not working.

The network news satire is sub-Network stuff (at least Paddy Chayefsky bothered to get the lingo right) and the digs at science are so old they nearly predate science itself. The self-referential humor is tiresome (a newscaster reports that the Monster "was spirited away by the ingenue") and Hartley's efforts to sum it all up at the end are so inelegant that I could hardly believe my ears. "This monster is ourselves, our hope and our fear," we're told. Thanks, Professor, but no thanks.

Framed

Stiff drink: Margarita Happy Hour isn't stylistically inventive enough to stand out from other realistic urban dramas, but genre is represented onscreen so rarely that a good example deserves to be seen. Director Ilya Chaiken explores a subculture I haven't seen represented on film before?hard-living urban boho women who've decided to have kids, and are having trouble reconciling their newfound motherhood with their lifestyle. While the performances vary widely in quality, and the finale strikes me as kind of a sellout, it's a smart, heartfelt, well-photographed and excitingly designed film, with a standout performance by Larry Fessenden (director of Wendigo) as a substance-abusing writer who's stayed with his girlfriend (Eleanor Hutchins) not because he really wants to, but because he feels it's expected of him.