Fox Searchlight
Sex, martinis and jazz: James Badge Dale (from left), Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan in "Shame."
The genitals are exposed while the motivations are mysterious in "Shame," an elegantly composed but overwrought film about a man who apparently wants to obliterate himself through sex -- to fornicate away the pain, so to speak.
The man, Brandon, is played by handsome Michael Fassbender, the year's breakout grown-up actor. (He's Rochester in "Jane Eyre," Magneto in "X-Men: First Class" and Jung in David Cronenberg's "Dangerous Method," a movie that connects nicely to "Shame," as you will see when it finally reaches Memphis.) Brandon is in his 30s, and he works in a glassy office that is almost as antiseptic as his shiny white apartment, with its stainless steel refrigerator and nice turntable. His fastidiousness is presented in ironic contrast to his "dirty" sexual addiction: He masturbates in the shower and in the toilet stall at work, he watches pornography on his laptop, he hires prostitutes, and he stalks and seduces women.
He is perhaps not as private as he thinks: His work computer is confiscated because it has contracted "some kind of virus," his boss tells him. The diagnosis: "Your hard drive is filthy." Perhaps Brandon is a Dorian Gray of the Internet age.
Brandon is a 30-something man living in New York who is unable to manage his sex life. After his wayward younger sister moves into his ...
Rating: NC-17 for some explicit sexual content
Length: 99 minutes
Released: December 2, 2011 Limited
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale, Nicole Beharie, Hannah Ware
Director: Steve McQueen
Writer: Steve McQueen, Abi Morgan
Brandon inhabits a weirdly exotic and alien Manhattan that likely reflects the perception of the film's British director, Steve McQueen, who previously teamed with Fassbender on the acclaimed "Hunger" (2008), about Irish prison hunger-strike leader Bobby Sands. In "Shame," a subway ride seems to take place in a sort of limbo. An awkward restaurant date with a co-worker (Nicole Beharie) is fascinating in its dreamlike unreality, in part because of the interruptions and odd recommendations of a waiter who, in some other type of movie, would be suspected of being an imposter or an angel.
The stricken heart of the movie is Brandon's strange relationship with his sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), a jazz singer who favors "fun" thrift-shop hats and who shows up, uninvited, to mooch a few nights on Brandon's couch. The interaction between the brother and sister has a disturbing sexual intensity: She calls him "weirdo," with humor; he calls her "slut," without. Sissy's confession that she and Brandon "come from a bad place" seems to be the key line in the script by McQueen and Abi Morgan ("The Iron Lady"). One can only imagine what childhood abuses and traumas were necessary to create such damaged adults.
McQueen favors long -- make that looong -- takes, which may make viewers more uncomfortable than the intentionally unstimulating sex scenes. The show-stopper is Sissy's 41/2 -minute nightclub performance of "New York, New York," complete with a 2-minute close-up of Mulligan. In another scene, the camera follows Brandon for two solid minutes as he jogs along a nighttime street. Most of the restaurant date is captured in a 6-minute shot in which the camera moves very little. The calmness and steadiness of the camerawork is, like Brandon's appearance and behavior, a deception -- a cover-up of chaos. It's the cool, solid rock that hides the crawling things.
In much the same way that Jake LaMotta and Travis Bickle become holy martyrs of pain in the films of Martin Scorsese (which seem to have been an influence on McQueen), Brandon seems to be a sort of saint of sexual suffering, dying (the little death, again and again) for the sins and hypocrisies of the audience. Fassbender and Mulligan give their all to this concept, but the movie is so humorless it borders on the risible; when, out of the blue, Brandon snorts a line of cocaine, we miss the less-pretentious absurdity of the somewhat-similar "American Psycho." And, in the year of Rick Perry and Rick Santorum, it's regrettable that the filmmakers choose a homosexual tryst as the ultimate symbol of Brandon's degradation.
The first NC-17 (adults only) movie to be booked in Memphis since Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution" in 2007, "Shame" is exclusively at the Studio on the Square.
-- John Beifuss: 529-2394
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