Parker Posey Action Hero

Parker Posey stars in a new movie Fay Grim by Hal Hartley. Hartley's movies are an acquired taste. They inspire love or ambivalence. I lean toward love. Often called a darling of indie cinema, Hartley, a Long Island director who now lives in Berlin, has a signature vision; quirky characters speak in a unique language-as in the dramatic articulation of characters in the films of David Mamet-only less stilted. Non-Hollywood, he even composes his films' scores. In 1998 we left Henry Fool, a writer/hero of a movie by that name, on the lam. Now in the sequel Fay Grim, his wife (Parker Posey) is center stage. A single mother living in Woodside, Queens, still emotionally attached to Fool, who left her high and dry in the previous film's sequel-ready ending, Grim takes off for Paris and Istanbul in hot pursuit; she's made a deal with Agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum): she will find Henry Fool in exchange for her brother, Nobel Prize winning poet Simon Grim's (James Urbaniak) release from prison. It seems Fool's Confessions, a text thought worthless actually ties him to international espionage, leaving Hartley to re-infuse a beloved, well-worn genre with new oomph.
             Even in person Parker Posey reminds me of Katherine Hepburn, only more angles and funnier. She's got that cheekbone thing. Dressed casually with an antique amulet on a chain, she looks decidedly downtown though it wouldn't take much to glamorize her. With hair twisted into a chignon and wearing austere black as Fay Grim, Posey shakes off the neurotic persona we have grown to love in earlier work: in You've Got Mail her book editor caricature is endearing even for the over-the-top selfishness she exudes; in For Your Consideration she is to star in the movie's conceit of a movie called Home for Purim. In a new film by Zoe Cassavetes, Broken English (opening June 22), she's cast as Nora Wilder, a lonely, pill popping New Yorker looking for Mr. Right. That she finds him in New York, in the form of a sensitive, lean and handsome younger Frenchman (Melvin Poupaud) who teaches her about being free, passionate, and eh, wilder is a Cinderella story of a sort; following him to Paris (yes, never enough Paris), accompanied by her best pal (Drea De Matteo) who is in her own marital funk, she reunites with him but the film's happy ending does not feel happy. These girls are just not having fun.

                                                                                                                      Regina Weinreich