→ December 2, 2011
→ By

Martha Marcy May Marlene.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a tense story of a woman who, after fleeing a cult-like commune, shows increasing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder as she attempts to reestablish her normal life and a relationship with her selfish sister and difficult brother-in-law. Based on the true story of a friend of writer/director Sean Durkin, the film is driven by two very strong performances and the use of both silence and background noise to allow the audience to feel the tension grow with the main character’s own mental troubles.

The film begins when Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, the younger sister of Mary Kate and Ashley) flees the commune where she has lived for two years and calls her sister to ask for help; the call is awkward and Martha nearly gives up, showing how far she had fallen into the clutches of the commune’s charismatic, depraved leader Patrick (John Hawkes). From there, we see parallel narratives, one tracking Martha’s first few days of freedom with her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and brother-in-law ted (Hugh Dancy) who want to help her as long as it’s no real inconvenience to them, the other following her two years in the cult from her first day to the incident that triggered her decision to escape. Both narratives follow similar curves with an initial ascent followed by a long, gradual decline, a dichotomy where each storyline intensifies the other.

The commune’s true nature only becomes apparent through gradual glimpses through Martha’s memory – and it’s possible that Martha isn’t a reliable narrator, given what happens to her in the other narrative – that reveal the commune to us more or less as it was revealed to her. She’s taken in as a bit of a lost soul, charmed by Patrick, eventually drugged and raped by him (which is explained to her as a “special” event that begins the “cleansing”) as part of her initiation. Patrick exercises control over the commune’s members through very subtle psychological manipulation, although that turns darker as the story develops. Martha – whom Patrick has rechristened “Marcy May,” as he renames all of the members – drifts into the lifestyle of the commune, never questioning any of its practices because she’s pleased, or at least satisfied, to have something resembling a family.

That need for family is explained in part by Martha’s time with her sister and brother-in-law, both flawed themselves and particularly ill-equipped to deal with a woman who has just fled a cult but claims she simply left a boyfriend. Her problems in this timeline start out as mere distance, moodiness, and ignorance of some social customs, but degenerate into delusions and paranoia, and Lucy and Ted show very little compassion or even the ability to generate it – we go through more than 80% of the movie before Lucy finally confronts Martha directly with the question of what happened to her during her two years out of contact. Their parents gone, Lucy is Martha’s only family, but there’s little warmth between them and more obligation than outright love, which stands in the way of Martha’s recovery almost as much as her own unwillingness to discuss what happened does.

Olsen is superb in the film, her first screen role, particularly in the second half of the film when she’s required to show a broader range of emotions; in the first half, she’s emotionally vacant in both narratives, but gets to stretch out into two different faces of the same character as the narrative unfolds. But Hawkes dominates his half of the story by almost trying not to dominate it: There’s no showiness, no bravura, just small gestures, eye contact, a faint change in the tone of his voice to convey the power he has over his charges. Olsen’s growing fear is the primary driver of the tension in the commune storyline, but Hawkes’ magnetism manages to elevate it even when all we have is the threat of his entrance. He’s a monster despite never acting like one; she’s the victim but never acts victim-like, only showing it through a slow crescendo of confusion and fear.

Both leads will at least be in the running for Best Actor/Actress nominations, although those categories are incredibly competitive, and if nothing else I think Martha Marcy May Marlene – the reason for the fourth name is too good to spoil – will end up with a Best Original Screenplay nod. If you can find it and like a tense, psychological drama with the tension of a British thriller, it’s well worth seeing.

I’d like to discuss the meaning of the end of the film, but for those of you who haven’t seen it, you may want to skip ahead. This paragraph has no value other than providing a warning and a buffer.

–

And this is another buffer, in case you didn’t listen the first time. Spoilers ahead.

There are three ways to interpret the end of the film, two literal, one other metaphorical. Perhaps the man is from the cult and has come to capture, harm, or kill Martha, which is certainly what she’s fearing. Perhaps the man’s appearance is just a coincidence; he could even be a random stalker, but not from the cult. But I favor a third interpretation – that the man’s status is irrelevant; the point of the scene is that Martha isn’t free of the effects of her two years in the cult, and might never be free. She will assume any incident like this is about the cult, or she’ll even experience more delusions like the two she had at the house and will see someone from the cult where there’s no one. The idea that her ordeal isn’t over is paramount, which is why it’s unnecessary to show the viewer the outcome of the incident in the street.

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→ September 16, 2011
→ By

Black Swan.

Black Swan is an extremely well-acted psychological thriller about a tightly-wound ballet dancer who may or may not be losing her mind as a result of the stress of her job (and, perhaps, malnutrition from her bulimia). It’s also thinly plotted and hard to watch because of (I assume deliberately) shaky cinematography and dim lighting.

A New York ballet company is putting on a production of Swan Lake just as its longtime star, now 35, is being forced out of her role due to age. Nina, a shy but very talented technical ballerina, wins the central part playing both the White and Black Swans in the show, but finds herself beset by doubts, hounded by impossible visions, and threatened by a new dancer just in from San Francisco who may or may not be trying to steal her role.

The movie rests heavily on the depth of its four main characters and the performances given by those actors. Natalie Portman won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her central role as Nina, a fragile, childlike ballerina who is perfect for the White Swan role but is so obsessed with perfection that she can’t provide the passionate, reckless dancing required for a convincing seductress Black Swan. Portman, like Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, has to be on pointe throughout the film to pull it off, as her character is in every scene and she must be credible as an adult whose emotional and physical growth has been stunted. I was put off by her wispy voicing of almost every line through the first hour and a half, although it did help cement her nervous, timid personality.

Mila Kunis probably earned more notoriety for her sex scene with Portman than she did for her work in the rest of the film, but whose work as a free-spirited, gregarious colleague who must create suspicion in the viewer’s mind about her ultimate motives was as essential to the film’s credibility as Portman’s work. Vincent Cassel, whom I’d only seen before in Eastern Promises, is outstanding as Thomas, the creepy-but-not-always-creepy director of the ballet company, a man who is probably abusing his position and yet gives no doubt that he is committed to coaxing a command performance from his star. Barbara Hershey, playing Nina’s mother, alternates between a vindictive Mommie Dearest and a loving if overprotective mother who is desperate to prevent ballet from ruining her daughter’s life while living vicariously through her daughter’s success.

But how much of what we see is real, and how much is filtered through the distorted lenses of Nina’s hallucinations? Much of what we see in the film is clearly faulty wiring in her head, including a scene where she peels a thick layer of skin off her finger, or another where her legs spontaneously break in absurd directions. But those obvious illusions could be tipping us off that much of what seems real isn’t, something backed up by frequent decisions to use a vantage point directly behind Nina’s head. Is her mother actually the witch we see in half of her scenes, or is that Nina’s perception of her? How much of Lily’s two-faced personality is, again, Nina’s jealousy manifesting itself in imagined or distorted conversations that are shown to us through her mind? I don’t think there’s a correct answer on this one, but after thinking about the movie for the last 36 hours, I’m inclined to believe that she is the film’s unreliable narrator, and virtually none of what we see before the final scene can be taken at face value.

The story itself contains enough small twists and turns to maintain a moderate level of tension, even though it should be clear from the start where we must finish, since Thomas explains the plot of Swan Lake and the script doesn’t hide the parallels between the film and the ballet within it. But the decision to shoot so many scenes from behind Portman on some kind of handheld camera made for very rough, shaky cinematography – again, possibly a conscious decision to reflect the turmoil inside of Nina’s head, but hell to watch at long stretches. That’s exacerbated by the fact that the lighting in just about every scene in the film is poor and everything is dank and gray, good for keeping the mood bleak but, again, tough to watch for a hundred minutes.

My wife danced for about seven years as a child at a local ballet school, so I defer to her on questions about the dancing in the film. Her gut impression was that we were seeing much more of Portman’s dancing double, Sarah Lane, than we were of Portman, saying the key was to watch the character’s feet – a non-professional dancer couldn’t point her toes or arch her foot half as well as someone who’s been dancing for a decade, because of muscle and bone development. She assumed that any time Nina’s feet were out of the shot or her face wasn’t visible – we had a lot of scenes where her face was blocked by another character or only visible in a blurry reflection in a mirror – that it was her double.

To answer two questions I’m anticipating from the regular readers among you:

* I’m torn on Best Actress between Portman and Lawrence. Both roles were difficult. Both women executed them about as well as I could expect. I think Lawrence’s was more difficult, but feel like I’m unqualified to make that judgment when it’s such a close call; it seems to me like playing a child who acts convincingly like an adult would be harder than playing an adult who acts convincingly like a child. I know Lawrence was more critical to Winter’s Bone than Portman was to Black Swan, but is that not analogous to judging an MVP candidate by the caliber of his teammates? I still lean Lawrence, but without confidence that she’s the right call over Portman.

* Best Picture: I’m through seven, and this would be at the bottom of the seven for me. Good movie, but not on par with the previous six I’ve seen. I think The Kids Are All Right is on its way to us from Netflix.

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→ December 19, 2009
→ By

The Human Factor.

“And yet I’d always believed that one day I would see him again … and then I would be able to thank him for saving Sarah. Now he’s dead and gone without a word of thanks from me.”
“All you’ve done for us has been a kind of thanks. He will have understood that. You don’t have to feel any regret.”
“No? One can’t reason away regret – it’s a bit like falling in love, falling into regret.”

Graham Greene’s The Human Factor is a spy novel that, as the title implies, focuses heavily on the human cost of espionage, particularly the psychological cost, as it follows MI6 agent Maurice Castle through his own reexamination of his motives and loyalties to an amoral institution that might be more dangerous than the people they’re allegedly fighting.

Castle is a British-born agent who, during a lengthy field op in South Africa, fell in love with a black woman and thus also fell afoul of the laws against interracial relationships during that country’s apartheid era. That woman, the Sarah of the quote above, escaped South Africa with the help of a prominent Communist and now lives with Maurice and her son (his stepson) in a quiet London suburb. Castle’s simple existence is compromised by a spiritual bankruptcy that becomes clearer to Castle as an investigation into a leak from his small department leads to unforeseen consequences and forces him to make a life-altering choice.

Greene’s view of spy games was that they were more mundane than typical spy novels and movies would imply, and the novel has very little violence and nothing you could call action, instead focusing on the individual characters, from the complex Castle to the true believer Percival to the unregenerate South African partisan Muller, and how they view and react to the possibility of a leak. Castle’s position is precarious by definition, as he’s one of only three or four potential leaks in the department, and he has a known connection to the communist faction in South Africa, whose white-led regime was at the time a battleground for the Cold War powers. He’s aware of the investigation, but when he sees how far Percival might go to protect the agency, regardless of the moral or legal implications of his action, he’s forced to act.

Greene was among the best practicioners of the spy novel for his very reluctance to rely on action sequences and overt violence, both of which are crutches for a novelist in any genre outside of hard-boiled detective fiction. Setting that restriction on his writing meant Greene had to spend more time on character development and crafting realistic dialogue and actions for his characters, whether he was writing a farce or, as in this novel, a serious commentary. He paints a bleak picture of intelligence services as bureaucracies filled with men who either have no moral compasses or are willing suppress them for the good of the agency, and in a secondary theme takes more than his share of shots at the apartheid policy of South Africa that was still in effect for sixteen years after The Human Factor‘s publication. But while Greene fleshes Castle out fully – not that he’s all that sympathetic, and it is his spiritual bankruptcy more than anyone’s that defines the book’s lack of a fixed morality – most of his secondary characters get secondary treatment. We see, for example, glimpses of the lonely career man Daintry, but his subplot has no start or finish and he appears in some ways to have wandered on to the wrong set. Cynthia, the primary secretary for Castle’s group, plays a key role in the investigation portion of the plot, but as a prop, not as a defined character. The Human Factor is thus more a story of bureaucratic decay in the intelligence service in pursuit of questionable means aimed at dubious ends than a story of its characters, even though the climax and denuoement are very much about Castle himself.

Next up: V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, which appears on both the Modern Library and TIME 100 lists and is one of two books that seem to be at the head of the Nobel Prize-winner’s canon.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ October 21, 2009
→ By

Hangover Square.

Sorry for the disappearing act, but it was a long and hectic week in Arizona. I’ll be on the Herd at 11:10 am EDT on Wednesday, and on Mile High Sports 1510 in Denver at 8:25 am MDT.

He walked through Castle Square to the sea. When he reached the sea he saw that dawn was breaking over it, dimly, bluely, feebly, amidst the torn clouds of rain. He smelt the air and felt better. He was glad he had done this. He felt like a walk. He was doing the best thing.
And then he felt a curious snap in his head.

Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, part of the Bloomsbury 100, is an overlooked work from the playwright behind the movies Rope (famous for director Alfred Hitchcock’s use of long takes with disguised cuts) and Gaslight, a psychological novel of a different sort: The protagonist is suffering from what we’d now call dissociative identity disorder*, and one of his personalities wants to murder the woman his other personality loves.

*Dissociative identity disorder is, according to one theory, a reaction to childhood trauma, such as abuse, but Hamilton depicts Bone’s split personality as something he’s had from birth.

George Harvey Bone’s primary personality is the saddest of sacks, a social outcast who spends his time following a group of libertines who abuse him verbally but are all too happy to take advantage of his occasional flush periods. The group includes Netta, an aspiring actress who is neither that talented nor that driven and is primarily hoping for luck or fate to hand her a big break. Bone is in love with her – or perhaps with the idea of her – and she plays with his emotions in a cruel, sadistic manner. Bone’s secondary personality is monomaniacal in its drive to kill Netta, realizing that she is the obstacle to Bone (or his primary personality) getting on with his life.

Hamilton was criticizing the seemingly impermeable barrier between social classes in interwar England, with Netta and her friends exploiting Bone when it suits them but refusing him full entry into their social circle. (Of course, part of their disdain for Bone is what they call his “dumb moods,” when he has actually clicked over to the secondary personality.) That subtext was obvious, but I’ve read several references to Hamilton also depicting fascism through the story, and I just don’t see it. It’s a good thriller, one where Bone’s murderous desires are made a little morally ambiguous by the rotten treatment he receives at the hands of the heartless Netta, and creeping fascism does receives its mentions (through Netta’s sort-of beau, Peter), but I’m hesitant to put more metaphor into the story than Hamilton intended.

The version of Hangover Square currently in print is full of unfortunate typos, and I’m not sure whether they’re from the original text or just sloppy editing by the new publisher. Some errors were unintentionally funny, like roadside “sinposts” (I assume you find those on the Highway to Hell) or, after a phone has been ringing for a while, “at last there was an answering dick,” without actually explaining who the dick was. (Sam Spade, perhaps? Philip Marlowe?)

Next up: I finished The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread while in Arizona; is anyone still reading it, or should I post a writeup with some discussion questions for those who already did? I’ve since moved on to Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 26, 2008
→ By

Eastern Promises and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Continuing with our recent theme of praising understatement in television/cinema, Eastern Promises delivers a similarly un-Hollywood thriller filled with complex characters and a small number of pivotal plot twists, with plenty of ambiguity to keep the viewer thinking, although a slightly coincidence-driven denouement did detract somewhat from the brilliance of the preceding 80 minutes.

Eastern Promises stars Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, the tough, stoic, possibly psychotic driver for a Russian organized crime family in London. A teenaged girl connected to that family ends up dying while giving birth in a hospital with midwife Anna (Naomi Watts), who is of Russian descent, attending. But what appears to be – and was marketed as – a straight-up thriller where Anna ends up chased by the mob because of what she knows about the dead girl turns instead into a series of interconnected threads around shifting loyalties within the crime family. Nikolai and Anna are well-drawn, complex characters, revealed in layers as the film goes on, as is Kirill, Nikolai’s boss and the son of the crime family’s patriarch. Even into the final scenes, we’re still learning about these characters.

Mortensen was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance, which was superb and utterly convincing, although I didn’t really see how any of us benefited from seeing him naked during the film’s major (and ultra-tense) fight scene. Watts was also superb in her role, and I was impressed by the filmmakers’ decision to dress her down for the entire film – her hair and especially her makeup were appropriate to the role, and while Watts is unspeakably pretty even without makeup, she was credible for the way she was presented.

The film’s ending, however, hinges on a misjudgment and a coincidence to lead to the climactic scene, which I can only imagine the scriptwriter envisioned first and had to work backwards to lead the characters to that place and situation. The misjudgment revolves around the unstated assumption that the hospital would not have a vial or two of the baby’s blood around, which strikes me as unlikely. The coincidence, the one sloppy bit of scriptwriting in the entire movie, revolves around Anna leaving the hospital just as Kirill arrives. A few seconds either way and the final scene never happens. The improbability of it all cracks the veneer of belief the film creates to that point, although the resolution itself is strong enough to complete the storyline and provide sufficient cover for the film’s few, minor lapses.

—

The Bourne Ultimatum is anything but understated. It’s an American-style – or perhaps just a Hollywood-style – thriller with unambiguously drawn characters, clear good guy/bad guy delineation, and enough action to make you momentarily forget the empty-calorie plot.

The first film in the series, The Bourne Identity, had surprising meat on it because of the title character’s identity crisis: He doesn’t remember who he is and doesn’t know his capabilities, then as he learns how skilled he is, he doesn’t know how he became that way. By now, we’re fully aware of who Jason Bourne is and what he can do, so there’s no more surprise when he busts out a new foreign language or escapes from an impossible situation. There’s some cleverness to the setups in The Bourne Ultimatum, and I won’t deny that it was exciting, but it’s not a good movie so much as a good movie for its genre.

Incidentally, Matt Damon reversed course and has now signed on to appear in a fourth installment of the series, which will give Julia Stiles a chance to stand around and look pretty some more, a task for which she seems rather well qualified.

Filed Under: DVDs Tagged With: , , , ,