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Fay Grim
Mixed or average reviews
Based on 26 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 6 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Action | Suspense/Thriller
Written by: Hal Hartley
Directed by: Hal Hartley
Release Date:
Theatrical: May 18, 2007
DVD: May 22, 2007
Running Time: 118 minutes, Color
Origin: USA / Germany
Summary
RATING: R for language and some sexuality
Starring Parker Posey, Liam Aiken, Chuck Montgomery, Jeff Goldblum, Leo Fitzpatrick, Saffron Burrows, and Thomas Jay Ryan
Writer-director Hal Hartley returns to the characters from "Henry Fool," following Fay, a single mom from Queens who is afraid her 14 year old son will grow up to be like his father, Henry, who has been missing for years. (Magnolia Pictures)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Amateur Flirt Henry Fool No Such Thing The Girl From Monday The Unbelievable Truth Trust
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Plotwise, the film seems actually designed to repel logic, almost a parody of a spy film. But it's played with such verve and dash and confident flair that you'll have a grand time.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
You won't see another film like Fay Grim this year, and we should give Hartley credit for making it work on his own terms.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kevin Crust
A sophisticated, sometimes intentionally silly spy thriller of international intrigue, Fay Grim charts the history of American foreign policy while commenting on current global complications with wink and a nudge.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
There's no other woman acting today that even remotely resembles Parker Posey. For that matter, there's never been anyone quite like her that I can think of. She has the dynamite improvisational instincts of a born grifter who wandered too far from one con and ended up in another – acting – and her tricky-risky game of onscreen three-card monte is, again and again, a jewel in indie filmmaking's oft-tattered crown.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Hartley is very adept with actors, though – or at least some of them. Posey, for her part, displays a pert quizzical quality that's very charming and very funny. And Goldblum is tailor-made for Hartley's minimalist patter.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman
While Fay Grim is too uneven to win Hartley many converts, it is laced with enough intelligence and wit to remind longtime fans why they were drawn to his unique vision in the first place.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
The movie opens with wit and dash, then devolves into a rather generic spy thriller.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
Strikes me as something of an elaborate mistake, a wasted opportunity and a script Hartley should have discarded. But I liked it anyway.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Fay Grim falls victim to its own worried hyperactivity; it shuts you out with chattery paranoia. Hartley wants us to see the big picture, but he forgets we need artists like him to bring it into focus.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
It's not that Fay Grim isn't amusing. It is, in that deadpan, skewed way that indie auteur Hartley's pics always are. But there's not much else going on here.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
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.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin
Sadly, there's a thin line between goofing irreverently on the maddeningly convoluted nature of spy thrillers and actually being a muddled mess, and Fay Grim crosses it constantly during its deadly second hour.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
Too hip to play it straight and too cool to resort to an actual story, Hartley turns the whole rambling spy game into a puzzle box where every certainty is thrown into doubt, every character has a hidden motive, and every clue is contradicted.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Stephen Holden
Too light-headed to qualify as satire, too poker-faced to register as comedy, Fay Grim belongs in its own stylistic niche: the Hal Hartley film.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
The involved backstory and Hartley's own generic music both prove burdensome; the main attraction is the cast's amusing way of handling Hartley's mannerist dialogue and conceits.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
Fay Grim is like watching stoners playing Risk and Clue at the same time.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen
Hartley's kooky cosmopolitan caper can never be accused of slumming, but the shift from dry, offbeat wit to politically charged drama is a little jarring, to say the least; it's a bit like taking in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" and having it morph mid-way through into "Shadows and Fog."
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
A strange international odyssey that becomes more complicated and loony by the moment. Some viewers will undoubtedly tune out early, others will follow as far as they can -- and a privileged few might make it all the way.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Jeremy Mathews
Fans of "Henry Fool" in particular, however, may dislike the complete disregard for the characters of the original film. But the most fervent of Hartley followers can praise the film as a brilliant deconstruction of the tacked-on cinematic sequel.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The result is that we feel deliberately distanced from the film. It is not so much an exercise in style as an exercise in search of a style. The story doesn't involve us because we can't follow it, and we doubt if the characters can, either.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
In most every frame, Hartley takes pains to tilt his camera at odd angles – in other words, he's gone literally off-kilter, and it's just off-putting. What's worse, a further hallmark of the Hartley canon, his self-reflexivity, has begun to smack of self-promotion.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
The faux espionage plot, with its winks at terrorism, is really just a convoluted plea for the relevance of precious indie artistes (i.e., Hal Hartley).
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
The trouble is, this is Hartley all over again. What seemed cutting edge and sharp in the 1990s -- the smart-alecky references to obscure filmmakers (Werner Herzog, Andrei Konchalovsky), the self-mocking tone in the actors' voices, the overall sense that this movie is subverting itself -- feels rehashed and old.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
As "Henry Fool's" belated sequel, Fay Grim seems nearly an act of desperation.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
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.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.8 (out of 10) based on 6 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
G L gave it an8:
This film got a bad wrap. Not as good as Henry Fool or the PowerBook, but nonetheless clever, witty, and visually fresh.
Chad S. gave it a5:
"Fay Grim" is exhausting to follow, but so was "Syriana", which might be the filmmaker's point. Most films about espionage are to some degree ridiculous in its labyrinthian construction. "Fay Grim" is all about style, all about the psuedo-seriousness in the actors' line deliveries. But even if you relax and conceed that the film's nonsensical plot is a straight-faced spoof on the spy genre(so you don't bother trying to understand the plot), "Fay Grim" is still off-puttingly repetitive. Worst of all, when the story shifts to Pakistan, there doesn't seem to be a hint of the underlying absurdness that's prevalent in the film's other locations. Because "Fay Grim" gets serious, you wonder if closer attention should've been paid to the story elements that lead up to the scene between Henry Fool(Thomas Jay Ryan) and the Osama bin Laden-wanna-be. Even the action scenes are more convincing. The filmmaker had previously used a series of frozen stills to stage his first action set-piece, but by the end of "Fay Grim", it's hard to distinguish the difference between arch satire and the real thing when we see an explosion(which is supposed to be anathemia to independent film), and a character getting shot. Only Parker Posey as the titular character makes this pretentious film worth watching.
Brook E. gave it a1:
I'm a HH fan but this film was dreadful, from its convoluted plot to its incessant Dutch camera angles. I prayed for it to end, since I saw it with friends at Sundance and I couldn't walk out easily.
