It arrives with something less than the heated expectations of, say, the Avengers sequel, but Ned Rifle is nevertheless the climax of a movie trilogy. You have to be a follower of the career of longtime indie hero Hal Hartley to really appreciate this closure, but apparently there are enough fans out there to have crowd-funded the budget for this typically modest finale. Hartley got on the map with The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, tiny-scaled films with dialogue written as 1930s screwball patter but underplayed by a hip, pokerfaced ensemble. The writer/director’s visibility waned after an epic-scaled character study, Henry Fool (1997), the movie that inspired the scattered sequel Fay Grim (2006) and now Ned Rifle.
This one won’t pay off unless you know the previous installments. It’s a tribute to Hartley’s work with actors that essentially all of his main players from Henry Fool return to their roles (along with other Hartley regulars, such as Martin Donovan and Bill Sage). This includes Liam Aiken, who was only 7 when he debuted in the ’97 movie and has since had a successful career as a child actor. He plays the title character, the son of big-talking philosophical jerk Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) and the currently incarcerated Fay Grim (Parker Posey, razor-sharp in her few scenes). Ned plans to kill his father for all the trouble he’s caused, but has to find him first. This leads him to his uncle, Simon Grim (James Urbaniak), the garbageman-poet previously mentored by Henry, but also to a jumpy grad student named Susan (Aubrey Plaza). She is obsessively stalking Simon, but her reasons won’t become clear until after she and Ned travel across the country—to Seattle and Portland, according to this entirely New York-shot film.
As much as I generally enjoy revisiting Hartley’s world, there’s a touch of half-baked off-off-Broadway theater about Ned Rifle. Some of its effects are downright cornball. Still, the film is much more in the groove than Fay Grim, and it has some signature Hartley non sequiturs. The cast understands how to deliver the material, and the newcomer—Plaza, the Parks and Recreation grump—doesn’t take long to fall into the house style. A technique as artificial as Hartley’s can be a kind of trap, but the ending of this 85-minute exercise feels like a real rounding-off (it’s as stirring as the end of Henry Fool ). And it suggests the possibility of something different for Hartley next time out.
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NED RIFLE Opens Fri., April 10 at SIFF Film Center. Not rated. 85 minutes.
