It would be a mistake to call Shame’s Brandon Sullivan a hedonist. His life is controlled and
partitioned, a place for everything and everything in its place. He’s a fairly
successful office worker who goes to work in an anonymous New York City office
building and then returns to his spare apartment with a minimum of
complications. It’s a life of quiet desperation, for the man has arranged his
life so carefully in order to hide his darkest, most shameful addiction. He’s
not an alcoholic, though he does like to drink. He’s not a womanizer, though he
loves flirtatious pursuit. No, he’s a sex addict. For him, it’s not about relationships.
It’s not about the pleasure anymore. It’s not even about meeting new people or
finding some small moment of solace from his lonely, meaningless life. It’s
about the desperate need to feel something,
to constantly seek new sources of stimulus, about clandestine, risky tendencies
that drive him to find someone, anyone, to help him get his next fix.
Of course, the film’s not really interested in exploring sex
addiction, at least not in any truly meaningful or distressing way. Wouldn’t it
be all the more disturbing to be a sex addict who wasn’t as handsome and capable
of charm as one Michael Fassbender? The terrific European actor has had
something of a Hollywood breakthrough year after first catching eyes with his
art house success in the 2008 IRA hunger strike drama Hunger and crossover scene stealing as World War II’s coolest film
critic in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious
Basterds. This year alone he was Jane Eyre’s Rochester, Carl Jung, and
proto Magneto. His performance in Shame is
without a doubt the most fearless of his roles this year. It’s a portrait of a
desperate man who hides his basest addictions under a calm, hesitantly charming
mask of dignified yuppie tranquility. It’s little wonder why women would be
attracted to him and why he wouldn’t let them stick around long enough to
figure out who he really is.
Unfortunately, there is one woman in his life in a position to
figure it out. That’s his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan), a fragile and aimless
young woman who shows up unexpectedly at his apartment one afternoon. She’s
been kicked out of wherever she had been and needs a place to stay. She’s a
singer. She says she’s making real money now. She just needs a warm place to
pass the time between gigs. She just needs the comfort and care of someone.
Brandon’s rattled by her appearance. He tries his best to hide his discomfort
and his addiction. She gets enough hints, though. It’s not an easy thing to
hide a life given over entirely to basest pursuits, especially in such a
furtive, urgent way.
Brandon’s boss (James Badge Dale) is a typical macho womanizer,
constantly hitting on waitresses and commenting on women’s bodies. For some
reason, that’s behavior that doesn’t fall too far outside the norm. Because
Brandon’s desires take a compulsive, secretive, insatiable form, it reads as
depressive, as a man trying to cover up ambiguous psychological problems with
physical sensation. One of the most thrilling sequences in the film, a string
of moments that have extraordinarily simple suspense and humor, involves Brandon going on
a date with a co-worker (Nicole Beharie) and trying to have normal conversation, to open up
emotionally with another human being. In the process, he has to withhold his
urges, resist slipping up and inadvertently revealing how he spends his time.
It’s difficult for him to be without a clear view to his next hit.
British artist Steve McQueen, who directed Fassbender in Hunger, has made a tightly controlled
film with a detached clinical eye. It’s a film that is extraordinarily well
made on every technical level. Harry Escott’s pounding score and the still,
smooth compositions that gain a sinuous power with each camera movement from
cinematographer Sean Bobbitt contribute to a skillful evocation of a man who’s
every waking moment is given over to his addiction, finding more avenues to
find what he wants or ways to cover up and otherwise make possible the
maintenance of a “normal” life.
This is a powerfully acted film, with Fassbender and Mulligan exuding a
kind of neediness and an intimate shared trauma that’s as concerning and
strangely symbiotically damaged as any relationship on film in recent memory.
These are characters with deeply felt problems from their pasts that are not
easily resolved in their present circumstances. They’re aware of the damage.
They may even be aware of the consequences. But they’re powerless to fix
themselves, let alone help each other.
The only thing holding the film back is its thematic game of
Mad Libs. It’s a film not just open to interpretation; it’s open to any interpretation. I love sparse
narratives and exercises in style as much as the next guy, but here McQueen
pushes the fuzziness of character to a detrimental extreme. The relationship
between Brandon and Sissy is ripe for analysis. At one point she tells him, “we
came from a bad place, but that doesn’t make us bad people.” So, they have a
shared past that is also a troubled past. What does that mean? What are Sissy’s
emotional problems? Fill in past trauma here. What is Brandon’s problem? Fill
in psychological explanation here. From what kind of “bad place” do they come?
Fill in backstory here. You get to pick whatever problems you want to read into
them. The ambiguity is at once thrilling and frustrating, as if McQueen had
such a killer idea for a film that he didn’t want to risk saying too much
thematically for fear of being called on the vacant ideas the end result covers
up only too well.
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