August 31, 1990 | It takes a few minutes for the audience to make out just what The Unbelievable Truth is all about. At first, we see a stoic young man, dressed entirely in black, standing beneath a bleak winter sky, thumbing a ride on a deserted stretch of Long Island highway. The image, and the faintly menacing music, cue expectations of something dark, something — an archetypical movie figure, the vengeance-seeking loner, on the road to settle old accounts.
But then some of the weird stuff starts.
The stranger, Josh (Robert Burke), walks over to where a family is stranded in a stalled car. Josh immediately takes charge, gets the car working and accepts a ride. “Are you a priest?” the driver asks, noticing Josh’s attire.
“No,” Josh replies, in the tone of someone explaining what should be obvious. “I’m a mechanic.”
Where is he heading? “Home.”
Where is he coming from? “Prison.”
Quick cut to the driver as he dumps Josh’s bag, and Josh, on the side of the road. Josh doesn’t say anything in his defense, he doesn’t even get upset.
He simply shrugs, as if to say, “Yes, I guess that’s how I’d react, too.’’ And then he sticks out his thumb again.
Despite these and other, more serious provocations, Josh maintains an admirable equanimity throughout all of The Unbelievable Truth, a sneaky, sidelong comedy that is set in Lindenhurst, a New York City suburb, but seems to take place in some lighter, brighter, more openly absurd suburb of Twin Peaks. Josh is the straight man of the piece, serving as a calm oasis of reason as he wanders through familial tempests, temperamental squalls, and stormy reunions.
Even though, according to local gossip, he killed at least one person, and probably others, before being sent off to prison, Josh seems like a polite and dependable young man. Little wonder, then, that the sister of one of his victims is very quick to forgive and forget. “Things happen,’’ she says, nonchalantly. ‘‘People make mistakes.”
Meanwhile, almost everyone else around Josh appears to be spinning off into one emotional extreme or another. Audry (Adrienne Shelly), a moody 17-year-old beauty, frets about the possibility of nuclear holocaust, and pages through books like The End of the World for recreational reading. She breaks up with her insufferably smug boyfriend, Emmet (Gary Sauer), a would-be yuppie who, even after being dumped, picks fights with any man who so much as looks at Audry. Vic (Christopher Cooke), Audry’s father, isn’t sorry to see Emmet go, but he isn’t happy to see the new object of Audry’s affections: Josh, the newly hired mechanic at his garage.
In the world according to Hal Hartley, the talented and impressively self-assured newcomer who wrote and directed The Unbelievable Truth, Josh, the recessively taciturn outcast, and Audry, the abrasively talkative pessimist, are soul mates, destined for a complementary union. But the movie is about more than their eccentric love story.
It’s also about shifting values, represented by Audry’s unexpectedly successful career as a fashion model, and by Vic’s mixed reaction to his daughter’s posing for underwear advertisements. (Yeah, the money is good, but, gee whiz , couldn’t she pose for swimsuits instead?) And it’s about the impulse to control the uncontrollable. Audry is certain that the world is totally screwed up, and tries to take charge of her fate by learning just how bad things might get after a nuclear blast.
Vic, more prosaic and practical in his outlook, is equally certain that ‘‘the world isn’t going to end with so many people making so much money.’’ He wants to put his rebellious daughter on the right track by forcing her, or cajoling her, to get a higher education. Vic even offers to make a sizable donation to the anti-nuclear activist group of her choice if she’ll at least study a few semesters at the local community college. She holds out for a better deal — like, being able to study literature, her primary interest. But Vic wants her to study journalism. After all, TV anchors make more money than models, and don’t even have to take their clothes off.
The Unbelievable Truth has the stark, no-frills look of a small-budget, grimly serious independent production, which only serves to make its deadpan lunacy all the more surprising. The actors are perfectly attuned to Hartley’s offbeat rhythms, playing their roles and conveying their ill-proportioned passions with the utmost sincerity.
Occasionally, the cleverness is too self-conscious, especially when Hartley makes transitions with titles: ‘‘Meanwhile,’’ ‘‘But . . . ,’’ or ‘‘A Month, Maybe Two Months Later.” Much more often, though, the comedy is subtle, almost subversive. Vic’s last name just happens to be Hugo, but nobody, not even his daughter, who supposedly wants to study literature, makes note of this. Hartley doesn’t push it — you either get the joke, or you don’t. Most of The Unbelievable Truth is like that.
