- Aubrey Plaza and Liam Aiken in Ned Rifle
Early on in Ned Rifle, which begins a weeklong run at Facets tonight, garbageman-turned-Nobel-Prize-winning-poet Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) surprises his nephew with the news that he’s given up poetry to run a video blog in which he performs a new stand-up routine each week. In a deadpan, single-breath delivery characteristic of writer-director Hal Hartley’s work, he explains:
As Hartley looks for meaning in fidelity to form, his characters are always searching for some ideological system that will give order to their lives. The influence of Catholic theology is most explicit in Amateur (1994), which stars Isabelle Huppert as a laicized nun, and The Book of Life (1998), which imagines a resurrected Jesus visiting contemporary New York. But Catholicism informs how characters talk about their life pursuits (writing, crime, auto repair) in all his films, providing his work with a moral seriousness that throws his breezy humor into relief. Yet the desire for transcendence through patient devotion, especially in the context of movie comedy, is seriously out of step with a culture obsessed with instant gratification. Ned Rifle mines this discrepancy for ironic humor, a constant of Hartley’s cinema and a consistent source of pleasure here.
