TV REVIEWS : ‘Simple Men’ Go in Search of Their Dad

PBS’ “American Playhouse,” noted for its consistently provocative, creative programming, has blown the limits of viewer patience this time out.

Writer-director Hal Hartley’s “Simple Men,” about two wildly different young brothers and their joint search on the back roads of Long Island for their long-lost radical/activist dad, is too quirky and arch an experiment to sustain its shaky moorings.

Most aggravating about Hartley’s style is not so much the visual dead spots masquerading as pregnant pauses but his stylized dialogue and aphorisms that sound like a collegiate trick. Minimalism as a concept is fine, but the spare, abbreviated conversations here become tiresome, even exhausting.

Hartley’s acting family here features campus cohorts from the acting program at the State University of New York at Purchase (notably the cynical Robert Burke and the bookish William Sage as the star-crossed brothers, and the quietly absorbing Karen Sillas as an independent-minded proprietor of a roadhouse who falls for one of the brothers.)

* “Simple Men” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15.