Ned Rifle
Director: Hal
Hartley
Writer: Hal Hartley
Starring: Aubrey
Plaza, Liam Aiken, Parker Posey, James Urbaniak, Thomas Jay Ryan
Rating: Four Stars Out of Five
Available now to stream on demand.
I'd wager a good
deal of money that Hal Hartley likes himself some Flannery O'Connor.
In his latest film, Ned Rifle, he has imbued the mid-20th
century author's sense of Christian guilt, moralization, social
discomfort, and oncoming disaster into every frame. He has swapped
modern urban academics, intellectuals, and the God-fearing reborn for
O'Connor's doomed Southern sinners, but the pain of social
interaction and balancing of faith with reality puts Hartley and
O'Connor on the same continuum.
The eponymous Ned,
played by Liam Aiken as a youthful, long-haired dead ringer for
comedian John Mulaney, has been cared for by an evangelical family
for the better part of his teenage years following his mother's
(Parker Posey) arrest for her part in a terrorism plot. His father
(Thomas Jay Ryan) also spent years imprisoned for sex crimes and
mental hospitals following adverse side effects for experimental
drugs. Hartley has a thing for extravagantly off kilter backstories.
Upon his 18th birthday, Ned decides to go out into the
world to meet his dad.
Oh, and he vows to
shoot the jerk dead.
One thing before we
continue here. One of the more remarkable aspects of Ned Rifle is
how integrated and natural all this stuff feels. Despite the reality
of it being the third film in a trilogy, following 1997's Henry
Fool (about Ned's father) and 2006's Fay Grim (about his
mother), nothing about these backstories and relationships has that
sitcom-y catchup stuff like, “Hey, remember when this important
thing related to today's plot happened?” There's a richness of
shared experience between characters that probably grows when one has
seen all three films – I haven't, but plan to in short order after
this viewing – but the important thing is nobody needs to see the
previous two entries to receive the full experience. This story is
self-contained yet clearly of a piece with a larger tale of one
horribly tragicomic family.
Got it? Cool.
Onward.
Ned first heads to
his poet laureate uncle (James Urbaniak) in New York for information
regarding the whereabouts of his father. The uncle, Simon, lives as a
shut-in in a hotel you'd imagine Hemingway would have stayed at on a
bender. In the lobby sits Susan (Aubrey Plaza), a graduate student
with an unhealthy fixation on, and connections to, all things Ned's
family. Plaza befriends Ned and on an adventure they go.
Plaza turns her
public and Parks and Recreation personas on their heads here.
She maintains the deadpan delivery, but there's a panicky anxiety
beneath everything. Her makeup is never right, always over-applied,
and her clothes are wrinkled, her skirts forever hiking up. This is
part of a sexual tension-temptation angle for the chaste Ned, but
it's part of her character being more than a mere temptress. She
can't put her life together, and it's all the Fool-Grim-Rifle
family's fault. It's about chemical imbalances and inability to
function socially as a result of confusion and trauma.
Ned, too, is
scarred, as one might expect. He has learned to be direct with
people, to the point of rudeness. There's a born again smugness at
the way he thumbs his nose at the sinners all around him, never
questioning his urges, or, you know, the murderous goal he has for
his father.
Ned's inability to
look inward provides much of the ironic detachment necessary to make
this more than a dreary mopefest. Ned Rifle is a funny movie.
It's a wry wit, and there aren't many belly laughs, but Hartley's
feel for the absurdity of these people's lives is spot-on. Much like
the poets and writers he populates the film with, it's a literary
sensibility, which at times detracts from the cinematic, aesthetic
qualities often required for a great film. However, Hartley's static
camera compositions can still be striking and evocative. That makes
it hard to ding him for lack of pizazz, even if the majority of the
film is point-and-shoot workmanship.
Ned's counterpoint
is his father, Henry, who gets a surprising – and pleasant –
amount of screen time for a character originally set up as the dragon
to be slain. He's brash, gross, paranoid, and oddly charming, able to
coerce people into doing pretty much whatever he wants. Ryan gets a
lot of traction out of his uncanny vocal resemblance to comedy elder
statesman Albert Brooks, a gravelly but calming timbre that shows him
to be self-aware and generally at peace with his sleaziness.
It is Henry who
gives the film its ultimate power. His acceptance of himself, even as
an objectively bad person, is somehow healthier than the denial of
Susan and Ned. It leaves Ned Rifle with the good kind of mixed
message, the kind that makes you think about the icky parts of
yourself and whether those are acceptable, especially if you can't
break yourself from those habits. By all means, give self improvement
a shot, but what happens if it doesn't take? Then you're up Ned
Rifle creek.
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