Hal Hartley Is Still Figuring It All Out Onscreen | Defector

"In Hal Hartley's new film Where to Land, a 58-year-old director of romantic comedies applies to become a groundskeeper at a graveyard. The director, played by frequent Hartley collaborator Bill Sage, is putting together his last will and testament, taking stock of his life in both the material and metaphysical sense. Joe, Sage's character, must make a list of his belongings-his kitchen table, the china from his first marriage, the rights to his films-while looking to contribute something more "useful and perennial" to the world."

"Hartley burst onto the independent film scene in the early 1990s with films like The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men, and Amateur. Those films contain many conventional Hollywood narrative techniques, but they are full to the point of bursting with philosophical discussions of love, politics, family, and religion, all addressed at a pace and in ways that rarely appear in traditional studio films. Hartley's status as a filmmaker springs from those abrupt changes of pace and his uncommon, uncanny comfort with contradiction."

"The narrative motion of Hartley's films are driven by characters who are defined by their ironic contradictions-a former nun who writes pornography, a garbageman poet, a distant father who played shortstop for the Dodgers and later bombed the Pentagon. When I spoke to Hartley over the phone, he told me these characters allow him to explore his own thoughts, "making dialogue between characters is a manner for me to think things through myself.""

Where to Land follows Joe, a 58-year-old romantic-comedy director who applies to become a graveyard groundskeeper while drawing up his last will and testament. He inventories belongings—kitchen table, first-marriage china, film rights—while seeking something more useful and perennial to leave behind. Hartley's films pair conventional narrative techniques with dense philosophical dialogue about love, politics, family, and religion, using abrupt tempo shifts and characters defined by ironic contradictions. Characters often embody paradoxes and allow philosophical questions to emerge within quotidian, mundane settings, making everyday life a site for reflective inquiry.

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