Film: Flesh Junkie, Homewrecker, Daredevil
You can tell a filmmaker has got his act together by the sense of place he instills in his movies. For instance, see how differently New York City is portrayed in the films of Woody Allen, Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese. It sometimes takes an outsider, however, to make us look at familiar sights in a whole new light, and that’s precisely what English artist-turned-movie man Steve McQueen does with the Big Apple in Shame, one of three year-end movie releases I’m reviewing this week.
Much ink has been spilled over how this riveting character study’s frank depiction of explicit sex earned it an NC-17 from the ratings board, but far less attention has been showered on the evocative glow of McQueen’s New York exteriors and interiors. They are the pristine canvas on which Brandon Sullivan, an Irish-born New Jersey transplant in his thirties, goes on the prowl to get his fix. He might have a cushy, high-powered job, but Brandon’s downtime is a broken record of opening bedroom doors, computer mouse clicks and frequent showers, all in service of that orgiastic high of which he can’t get nearly enough. It’s a Groundhog Day of rampant depravity, and McQueen has reserved a front row seat for us.
Brandon, played as a sharply dressed emotional black hole by an astounding Michael Fassbender, doesn’t like surprises, so he’s less than pleased when he walks into his bathroom to catch his baby sister Sissy (a vulnerable Carey Mulligan) taking a quick shower. After much cajoling, he reluctantly agrees to let the platinum-blonde pixie crash for a few days. What happens during those few days brother and sister are tenuously reunited? Sissy’s volatile energy, which causes recurring verbal sparring with a frustrated Brandon (she is, after all, cramping his style), forces the insatiable lothario to reexamine his compulsion, and it’s in that struggle, which Fassbender conveys by that wounded expression in his otherwise vacant eyes, where Shame finds its soul.
McQueen complements Fassbender’s no-holds-barred, full-frontal portrayal with his trademark long takes. In one extended uninterrupted shot, we simply watch Brandon jogging at least one city block. In a standout scene, Sissy, performing at an upscale Manhattan bar, serenades the crowd with a haunting low-tempo rendition of “New York, New York.” McQueen refuses to shorten the song – he only cuts away to a closeup of Fassbender – but the effect is hypnotic.
Fassbender and McQueen collaborated once before, on the 2008 Irish-strike prison movie Hunger, which subjects viewers to an emaciated Fassbender starve himself in excruciating detail. The handsome Irishman’s journey in his latest film is no less harrowing, though I did wish McQueen’s screenplay, which he co-wrote with Abi Morgan, refrained from suggesting, albeit briefly, a Pop Psych 101 explanation for Brandon’s urges. They also could have avoided turning Mulligan’s character into such a fragile wreck. The Oscar nominee is in rare form here, particularly during a one-take scene in which Sissy and Brandon reopen old wounds, but she has yet to top her work in An Education.
Shame belongs, as it should, to Fassbender, who wraps up an impressive 2011 roster (Rochester in Jane Eyre, Magneto in X-Men: First Class, Carl Jung in David Cronenberg’s upcoming A Dangerous Method) with a raw, richly nuanced star turn that only resorts to excess towards the very end. By that point, however, we’ve become fully invested in his quest to find himself. He might have used his, um, endowment to draw us into Brandon’s seedy world, but he turns to his acting chops to keep us stimulated.
Shame‘s selling point is Fassbender uncut. How can Up in the Air director Jason Reitman measure up to such a sizable offering? He gives us Theron unhinged. In Young Adult, this weekend’s other portrait of stunted growth, the South African star of Monster and Hancock dives headfirst into the role of Mavis Gary, a jaded Minneapolis writer who hightailed it out of her ass-backwards Minnesota hometown and became a successful author of teenybopper lit. As the movie opens, she’s about to miss her deadline to deliver a draft of the last volume in the (formerly) bestselling series chronicling the misadventures of lovelorn high schoolers. (She’s a procrastinator. That makes her my role model.) She opens an email showing a picture of a baby, and the memories come rushing back. Former sweetheart Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson, ideally cast as the clueless dreamboat) is inviting her to celebrate the birth of his new daughter. Say what?! Mavis packs her laptop, her precious Pomeranian and some early-nineties cassettes into her Mini Cooper and drives off to get her man back.
So what if Buddy’s happily married? That’s the harsh reality former classmate Matt Freehauf (a superb Patton Oswalt) points out when she sits next to him at a local bar. Mavis, naturally, has no time to think about such details, or to mingle with such a nobody. It hardly matters that Matt, a resolutely hetero sci-fi geek, was gay-bashed in high school and left with a bum leg. Girlfriend’s got her eyes on the prize, even as it becomes clear to everyone but her that she’s wasting her time chasing after her former flame.
Reitman, who reunites with her Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody, starts turning the screws on the audience as Mavis’s behavior becomes more unstable. This is where Young Adult, a digital movie with an analog heart, begins to lose its way. Reitman, only 34, displayed precocious talent behind the lens in his earlier films – his debut feature was the pitch-black satire Thank You for Smoking – but in trying to navigate the thorny emotional territory explored much more effectively by filmmakers like Noah Baumbach (Margot at the Wedding) and Mike White (Year of the Dog), he betrays a lack of world experience. Cody’s scenario, which revels in Mavis’s prima-donna sense of entitlement, resorts to shrill histrionics when it should have gone in the opposite direction. Young Adult‘s uneasy mixture of empathy and condescension toward its deluded anti-heroine mars what was well on its way to becoming a perverse bonbon filled with malice and occasionally misplaced ill will. See it for Oswalt and Theron, who reach a level of understated honesty that the rest of Young Adult strives feverishly to capture.
If Charlize Theron’s rabid would-be homewrecker is trying to find true love, Tom Cruise’s aging government agent is attempting to restore his good name. Any doubts you might have as to whether we really needed another entry in the wildly uneven Mission: Impossible franchise are immediately dispelled in the current installment set to hit IMAX screens on Friday. What on earth could bring about this mainstream miracle? Two words: Brad Bird. The animation wiz behind Disney/Pixar’s The Incredibles and Ratatouille makes his live-action debut with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, and the outside-the-box thinking that got him on the director’s chair amounts to nothing less than a stroke of genius.
Ghost Protocol (that’s M:I 4 if you’re counting) picks up several years after its predecessor. When we first see Ethan Hunt (Cruise, in action hero mode), he appears to be rotting away in a high-security Moscow jail. The expertly crafted prison break that ensues is nothing short of jaw-dropping. Even more astonishing: Bird’s just warming up. Following an aborted assignment inside the Kremlin (another stunning setpiece), it’s up to Hunt and his colleagues Jane (Paula Patton), Benji (Simon Pegg, reprising his M:I 3 role) and Brandt (The Hurt Locker‘s Jeremy Renner) to prevent a Russian mastermind (Swedish actor Michael Nyqvist) from getting his hands on nuclear-warhead launch codes that would allow him to bomb the U.S. (shades of Bird’s Cold War-era gem The Iron Giant). Bird’s having a blast tinkering with a new toolbox, and so is longtime composer Michael Giacchino, who embraces the 007 parallels as gleefully as he did in The Incredibles. The result is popcorn entertainment of the highest order, a slam-bang dazzler fueled by Bird’s irresistible, can-you-top-this showmanship. In a word: wow.
Steve McQueen’s Shame begins pushing the envelope, and then some, this Friday at Regal Cinemas South Beach and Fort Lauderdale’s Gateway Theatre (gatewaytheatre.org). That same day, Young Adult confesses its undying devotion to South Florida moviegoers in wide release. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol expands to non-IMAX screens next Wednesday, but do yourself a favor and pay the higher admission. You do not want to miss this movie.
