'FAY GRIM' THE WORLD'S CHATTIEST SPY MOVIE -- EVER.

Byline: Bob Strauss

Film Writer

Oh, these summer sequels with their spies and car chases and explosions and minimal, sub-literate dialogue.

Wait, scratch that last complaint about "Fay Grim." It's actually too eruditely loquacious for its own good.

And as for being a summer action sequel, well, only in the broadest, most technical sense of the term. It's longtime, never-really-took-off indie writer-director Hal Hartley's follow- up to his 1998, um, blockbuster, "Henry Fool." That sold less than $1.4 million worth of tickets, but that's "Spidey 3" territory for a Hartley film; even his best work, like the genuinely intriguing "Amateur," doesn't usually make more than six box-office figures.

I acknowledge that this is a pretty snide way to start a review of a clearly intelligent film. Guess I'm just following the style Hartley chose for "Fay Grim," which is basically to have the title character, played by Parker Posey, mouth off sarcastically at anyone and everyone she encounters for the first half of the movie, then come to emotionally charged realizations about not only the depth of her own feelings but the corrupt geopolitical state of the world as well.

So the movie, you could say, is both fey and grim. Truth in advertising may be its biggest virtue.

Clarity of narrative is one of its least. For the benighted few who didn't catch "Henry Fool," I'll do my best to orient you.

Underhanded free spirit Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan) had a son with Fay and convinced her garbageman brother Simon (James Urbaniak) to become an internationally renowned poet. Then Henry left the country illegally, Simon helped him and got thrown in prison for it, and Fay has been bitterly raising their boy alone in Queens ever since.

Now, a decade or so on, secret agents are all over Fay about some notebooks Henry scribbled that may be coded revelations of spy agency secrets. She agrees to go to Paris to help sort out the mess if they'll spring Simon from jail. In France, approximately 500 different people (actually four or five, but it feels like legions) claim to be Fay's liaison and give her conflicting information. She gets the impression that Henry may still be alive and heads off to Istanbul to find him. There, she comes to accept that even though she hates the creep, she still loves him, too.

This thing is so complicated it makes "Memento" look linear. To make matters less intriguing, Hartley doesn't have his characters converse, but deliver convoluted, tongue-

torturing explanations to one another. Posey and Jeff Goldblum, who plays the head American spy, have a certain facility for this. But the rest of the cast come off like extra-

impassioned visiting lecturers, delivering dissertations on topics too arcane for anyone to want to listen to anyway.

With a certain admirable perversity, Hartley spends most of the movie just having people yap at one another this way. But eventually guns get drawn, a few tires squeal, something blows up -- and we still don't care.

Bob Strauss [phone]

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FAY GRIM - Two stars

(R: violence, sex, language)

Starring: Parker Posey, Jeff Goldblum, James Urbaniak, Saffron Burrows, Elina Lowensohn, Liam Aiken.

Director: Hal Hartley.

Running time: 1 hr. 58 min.

Playing: Landmark's Nuart, West Los Angeles.

In a nutshell: Talky, snide satire of international intrigue turns serious about its subject about halfway through but made itself impossible to care about well before then.

CAPTION(S):

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Photo:

Parker Posey and Jeff Goldblum do a whole lot of talking, as do all the other characters in "Fay Grim," the sequel to writer-director Hal Hartley's 1998 film, "Henry Fool."