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The local corner convenience store is forever transforming: into a coffee bar, a poetry club, and finally, a rock n’ roll venue. The local corner crack head cleans up his appearance, wears a suit to campaign for a high-profile Republican congressional candidate, and ultimately settles into his new role as abusive husband and sexually violent stepfather. It’s the purple plot antics of any number of soap operas, but Hartley pushes them towards the level of the mock epic with a surprisingly hefty 137 min running time, and leaves the viewer with a final ambiguous shot that suggests both complete freedom and a defining imprisonment.

Fay Grim doesn’t so much subvert, contradict, or call into question the events of Henry Fool as it simply adds another, quite nonsensical, layer beneath them all. (As an experiment for anyone who has never seen either, I would be curious if watching Fay Grim first would make Henry Fool more or less enjoyable). This new level seems hatched off the kind of conceit that an actor uses when creating for their own benefit a thorough biography for the character they are about to play.

To sum up simply, it is revealed that Henry Fool, far from being only a convicted felon with a sketchy past and no future, is actually a lifelong CIA operative who has been on hand at some of the USA’s more notorious operations over the last 30 years. With him missing and presumed dead, Henry’s widow Fay is approached by the CIA to help them retrieve his “Confessions,” which apparently are coded messages meant to embarrass the country by revealing national security secrets. Fay is reluctantly roped into the operation and travels across Europe and Asia, finding herself a pawn in a game of international intrigue. As loopy as that may sound, it plays a lot less broad than you would imagine.

There a few key things to focus in on in regards to Fay Grim that distinctly separate it from Henry Fool (aside from, of course, the whole “he’s a spy” plot twist.)

For starters, it’s a more “gorgeous” but also more sterile looking film. Cinematographer Sarah Cawley shot on digital lending a distinct otherworldly quality to the rare moments of “action” in the film (which Hartley who also edited and did the score, expresses through a quick succession of still shots, finding another avenue to render violence less, um, violent) but also preventing the film from feeling anything like a travelogue. Many scenes are set in hotel rooms, on rooftops, or secluded side streets so that a film that actually was shot on location feels remarkably boxed in by generics.

Fay Grim is also a much angrier film, politically fueled, without the satiric tweaking of a broad range of subjects and targets that Henry Fool contains. The focus is almost exclusively on the international policy scene. Jeff Goldblum uses his ironic demeanor and a comic cynicism to play a rival CIA spook that has long been obsessed with bringing Fool in. He is primarily a foil, but simmering just below the surface is a rage brought on by a sense of superiority being impinged upon by having to muck around with “real people” like Fay Grim. Without any overt references to 9/11, Hartley’s film is distinctly set in a world reeling from the fallout of that attack, where some peoples or groups seem to have been locked in for lifetime of ceaseless suspicion and doubt. There is a terrorist in Fay Grim and an act of terror, but it seems to function more as a plot device to wipe clean most of the new characters added for this film.

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