MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Simple Men’: Road Movie With a Twist

Hal Hartley is a filmmaker who takes us to familiar-looking yet utterly strange places: modern cul-de-sacs where anxiety meets lassitude, honor battles absurdity, and love tries to strike a bargain with lust. He’s a comic original, but he’s not just a comedian. With his mixture of sly wit and wary compassion, he’s able to dig deeper into his characters than all but a handful of American directors, especially the self-consciously serious ones.

“Simple Men” (NuWilshire, Beverly Center Cineplex), the third of Hartley’s features, is his most expensive film, but just as lyrically offbeat and brilliantly wacky as his other two. In it, he uses a form with specific period-political implications: the ‘60s-’70s American road pictures. And, as usual, he’s twisting everything up, around and inside-out.

The road movie form suggests alienation and rebellion, or a look at the American underclass. But though Hartley deals with “ordinary” American people here, in his hands, they look and sound anything but average. At the center is a deeply emotional situation that goes oddly askew: two mismatched brothers looking for their father. The brothers, Bill and Dennis McCabe (acted wonderfully by Robert Burke and William Sage), seem unalike, but only superficially. Bill is a small-time crook, mercenary, hard, unsentimental, always looking for the angle. Dennis is an introvert and idealist, who shows exemplary love and trust.

The brothers have an archetypal “Hud”-style personality split, and, in the usual road movie, Bill would lead Dennis to destruction, or Dennis would reject Bill. But there’s a difference here. Almost immediately, Hartley starts throwing wild curves.

The missing father is an all-star Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop who became a ‘60s radical and is wanted for trying to blow up the Pentagon. (It’s probably no coincidence that this bizarre character has the same name as Warren Beatty in “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.”) A computer heist blows up in Bill’s face after a blindfolded guard gives him a holy medallion. Two women, hardened Kate (Karen Sillas) and will-o’-the-wisp Elina (Elina Lowensohn), enter the brothers’ lives when Elina throws an epileptic fit. The male-female bonds that follow are post-’70’s: edgy, tit-for-tat, unsettling.

Scenes turn strangely stylized. The actors play on several levels; almost everyone is anachronistically articulate. And, though the events are often wholly unlikely, they’re fashioned with such conviction, that everything, or anything, seems possible. This is a movie where a gas station attendant (Mark Chandler Bailey) will break out into an electric guitar breakdown on “Greensleeves” and fill his orders in pidgin French, the local sheriff (Damian Young) will bewail his marriage in tones of purest psycho-babble and dancers gather around the jukebox for pseudo-Marxian bull sessions.

On the surface, the film seems lucid and straightforward. All the acting is clear and right, the visuals luminous. But, as the story gathers momentum, it keeps getting crazier, looser. Hartley seems incapable of playing any scene in the “right” key, and this seeming perversity keeps the film stingingly alive. “Simple Men” is a classic example of what Andrei Konchalovsky calls the “Logical Unpredictable.” Nothing can be anticipated, but everything falls into place.

In all his works, Hartley shows a truly unique style and voice, and a beguilingly comic take on things. But if you look at them inattentively, you may think he and his characters are just dawdling, marking time. And, in a way, they are. Hartley’s people, mostly East Coast outsiders, malcontents and drifters, tend to float confusedly though the chaos of their lives in ways that suggest they’re improvising, none too confidently, from moment to moment. Even so, their destination is right; they arrive with purity.

Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, Chantal Akerman and Preston Sturges are a few of the movie influences Hartley has named, and you can see that mix in his style. On one hand: art-film ennui and poetry. On the other: breezy American wit and sarcasm.

“Simple Men” (rated R for language and sensuality) almost perfectly illustrates one of Bob Dylan’s lines from “Blonde on Blonde”: “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” Those are ironic words, but strong ones: Honesty, of course, is never simple. But it’s usually beautiful, and so is the movie.

‘Simple Men’

Robert Burke: Bill McCabe

William Sage: Dennis McCabe

Karen Sillas: Kate

Elina Lowensohn: Elina

A Fine Line Features release. Director/screenplay Hal Hartley. Producers Ted Hope, Hartley. Executive producers Jerome Brownstein, Bruce Weiss. Cinematographer Michael Spiller. Editor Steve Hamilton. Costumes Alexandra Welker. Music Ned Rifle. Production design Dan Oulette. Art director Therese DePrez. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (language, sensuality).