Hal Hartley's latest feature and hence inevitable. It's been a while since the last one — Ned Rifle (2014) — and I hadn't followed what happened since I saw the original Kickstarter pitch from 2019. That included enough of his collaborators from his 1990s glory years (Bill Sage, Elina Löwensohn, Parker Posey but not Martin Donovan) to get me a little excited. Apparently the pandemic led to the project being abandoned and the rebooted Kickstarter ("three and a half years" later) was shorn of all the stars except Sage. Hmm.
The runtime is brief — barely 75 minutes — with some scenes (all those on the subway) running long enough to feel like padding. Sage is a proxy for Hartley to get his musings on aging out there. It's a life full of people and stuff: records and books, romantic comedies made, some dodgy philosophy. Curated collections in other words. Initially Sage goes looking for a job with cemetery-maintainer Robert John Burke that palely echoed their earlier work in Simple Men (1992). Afterwards he visits an older lady (Kathleen Chalfant) who engages in a expository philosophical dump, and then everyone piles into his apartment. It did not achieve his signature arch artificiality; by falling so far short it just felt bogus. Perhaps he couldn't pull enough actors of the requisite calibre.
