“A barely imaginable horror lies just below the surface of our normal life and threatens to break through at any time. The inescapable, unbelievable truth about our lives today is that at any given moment each and every one of us could become a broken and confused animal scratching at the surface of the earth for some small sign of life.”
I don’t know what it is about Hal Hartley, but I’ve always enjoyed his sensibilities as a filmmaker. His characters are alive, substantial, and memorable. Even to the most trivial, the chubby guitarist in the jumpsuit playing “Greensleeves” by the side of the road for no other reason than he wanted to. Maybe that’s what it is. He wanted to.
I don’t know that he lived in Lynbrook, observed his friends and neighbors, and then crafted stories around them to make his movies. Maybe he knew Audry Hugo (Adrienne Shelly), the girl at the center of The Unbelievable Truth, the focus of the story, who finds herself drawn, like the deep center of gravity, toward Joshua Hutton (Robert Burke), back from prison to set things right in this small town. She likes him immediately, even as she fears imminent death from nuclear war. This is a Gen-X thing. We were all like this.
Joshua has a history with several people in this town, and the denizens all have different stories about what led up to his incarceration. It’s like John Hughes but slightly more adult with a much lower budget. This is Long Island, not Chicago. Audry is dissatisfied with her life thus far. She makes deals with her dad. He wants her to go to school. She wants to become a model and promises to pay him back for his investment in her chosen future.
Everybody has advice for her, and the only person she gravitates to—Joshua, has nothing to offer except himself, dressed in black with a dark past, a vessel of support, not intimidation or admonishment. That’s probably why she’s attracted to him. Meanwhile, she still hears those distant sirens.
This is a wonderful, cock-eyed romance, and a time when I had discovered everything in independent cinema outside of Tarantino, Jarmusch, Lee, and Linklater. It’s indicative of the time when there were incredibly talented young actresses that were the faces of small films. Shelly, Parker Posey; even Greta Gerwig and Mia Goth were once considered the darlings of indie movies, but it was Shelly who started the trend.
It was Kevin Smith who thanked (with Lee, Linklater, and Jarmusch) Hal Hartley for “leading the way” in the end credits of Clerks. When film mattered, these things mattered. It’s sad that it’s all slop these days, and all these great filmmakers can’t really do what they want to do, but …
Adrienne Shelly died on November 1, 2006, twenty years ago. Bronwyn was seven months pregnant with our daughter, and we watched Trust that night. Isn’t it weird? I think Trust is my favorite Hal Hartley movie, as well as my favorite performance from Shelly. Shelly had just finished making her own movie, Waitress. I felt I had to do something to mark the occasion. I wrote a review for Second Union when her widowed husband made a documentary for HBO/Max called Adrienne. I can’t believe it’s been twenty years.
October 22, 2026
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