Critics reviews

While Michael Spiller’s camerawork remains sharp and naturalistic – though making use of some solid blocks of bold colours in the frame – from the outset, with the actors’ stylised delivery and dialogue, including several examples of deliberately varied repetition, we are at one remove from any kind of naturalism, with everything in quotes, as it were.

It looks great, with saturated colours and sharp medium shots complementing the laconically stylised axioms and ironies of Hartley's droll dialogue. The story contains more than enough twists and digressions to fuel a film twice its length; the actors are admirably in tune with the director's quirky sense of characterisation; and he himself never yields to the temptation of weirdness for weirdness' sake. Most impressive, perhaps, is that the formal audacity and inventiveness are topped off with such sparkling wit.

The prevailing tone of Hartley's films is droll, flip and ironic. His characters (usually played by members of his repertory team) brush against the big dilemmas of life and love, morality and mortality, but shrug most matters off with a wry gesture... Simple Men finds it hard to affirm any positive values in a listless world but, all the same, it is animated by a whimsical nostalgia for the better days that no Hartley hero can quite manage to remember.

Although not as wryly funny as his other movies, Simple Men has its simple pleasures: a bossy nun sneaking a cigarette, a gas station attendant performing an electric guitar solo of “Greensleeves,” a drunken dissertation on Madonna and sexual exploitation. Even more so, the way he uses a personality quirk or an off-handed remark... to give his story emotional resonance is wonderfully inventive. Like other Hartley films, Simple Men is good, but it's not great.

[A] film like "Simple Men" doesn't seem, in a sense, intended to be seen. The characters would probably prefer to have their privacy. Nor does the film go out of its way to provide any sort of conventional entertainment value; you have to put the material through a filter of irony in order to appreciate it. Yet, it must be admitted, Hartley's visual compositions are elegant and his actors are masterful at creating the required mood, which is somber and sincere (and funny, but the actors pretend they don't know that).

Very little is edifying or amusing, as if some sycophantic fan of the director's tried his hand at hipstering... Everyone's out to lunch -- in front of the camera and behind it. "Simple Men" is one perpetual dead spot, full of aimless characters in search of a movie.

"Simple Men" has plenty of plot, but no design. There's a forced serendipity to the tale, amplified by the zombielike performances of the actors. Deadpan suits the cynical Burke, who played a similarly enigmatic crook in Hartley's promising first film, "The Unbelievable Truth." But Burke and the other cast members are only mouthpieces for Hartley, who writes aphorisms, not dialogue...

"Simple Men" is mannered in the terrifically knowing way of someone who has looked too long at the movies of others, especially, in this case, at the movies and mannerisms of Jean-Luc Godard... Art can be quoted, as Mr. Godard and his New Wave colleagues were all too fond of doing, but it can't be re invented. Art recycled, as Mr. Hartley seems to be doing here when he is most successful, tends to become merely fashion.

Both at one with his previous work and a significant step beyond it, Hal Hartley’s “Simple Men” is a beautifully realized American art film. Tale of two brothers’ search for their renegade father, and the major life change one of them experiences, possesses exceptional literary and cinematic qualities, as well as an emotional resonance new for the director.