Old Yorker

  • Martha Marcy May Marlene

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sean Durkin (2011)

    In order to tell the story of what happened to twenty-year-old Martha during the two years she was out of contact with her elder sister Lucy (her only family), the writer-director Sean Durkin depends on an artificial delaying tactic.  Martha escapes from the commune she’s been part of in the Catskill Mountains and phones Lucy, who drives upstate to take Martha back to the lakeside holiday home elsewhere in New York State that Lucy and her new husband Ted have recently bought.   Martha’s behaviour there is so bizarrely anti-social that it’s hard to believe the humourlessly conventional Lucy and the pompous professional highflyer Ted (a developer) put up with it for as long as they do.  They make next to no attempt to get Martha to explain where she’s been and, although she’s making their lives an unpredictable misery and they can see she’s seriously disturbed, it takes a long time before they do anything about it.  (In the film’s last quarter-hour they arrange Martha’s admission to a mental hospital.)  Even allowing for Lucy’s half-hearted guilt about failing in her relationship with her younger sister, Ted would surely have called time once he discovers Martha, who’s slipped into the couple’s bedroom unheard, lying on the bed beside them as they’re having sex.   The film moves back and forth between this ménage à trois and Martha’s memories of her experiences in what plot synopses of Martha Marcy May Marlene standardly describe as ‘an abusive cult’.  The latter sequences are absorbing.  I grew increasingly impatient with those chez Lucy and Ted.

    In terms of atmosphere and movement, though, Durkin’s first feature is good.  The unstressed transitions between past and present make clear how these co-exist in Martha’s mind (the editor is Zachary Stuart-Pontier).  The life of the cult – in their cramped house and the spread of cultivated but gaunt land outside it – is described as a series of routines which, because they’re routines, convey a sense of what’s become normal life for the inhabitants, even though it seems to an outsider perverted.   This quality is centred on the presence of the cult leader, the usually (and unusually) calm and quiet Patrick.  Wiry John Hawkes is fearlessly empathetic in the role.   His composure gives Patrick authority and, by investing him with an unaccountable seductiveness, Hawkes makes him more disturbing than a conventional bogeyman would be.  You’re aware of his charm but, because his behaviour is so shocking, you keep recoiling from Patrick – when this happens, you feel disturbed by being charmed.  Patrick sits on the staircase and, through the banister, watches the young men in the cult having sex with the girls.  He does so with a pacific intentness.   When he himself is penetrating the girls from behind, he’s unignorably present yet there’s also an insubstantiality about him – he’s a real incubus.  (The members of the harem sometimes give birth.  We learn that the babies are all boys:  presumably girls are killed as soon as they emerge from the womb.)  Playing his guitar and singing a song dedicated to Marcy May (Martha’s cult name), Patrick has a modest, gently romantic air.  John Hawkes was deservedly Oscar-nominated for Winter’s Bone last year but he goes well beyond that fine performance here.  He’s not been nominated this time simply because he’s bringing a deviant to life in a complex and an uncomfortably believable way.

    It’s a strength of Martha Marcy May Marlene that the world of Lucy and Ted is, compared with the cult world, both comforting in its normality and rebarbative in its materialism.  There are times when you understand Martha’s nostalgia for the commune life and Patrick has more interesting things to say than either of the normal couple – for example, that when you feel fear you live more fully in the present.  Supporting and enclosing the narrative are the spare music of Daniel Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans and a sound design in which ominous, unidentifiable noises are explained as something perfectly normal yet retain an echo of their initial, disquieting charge.

    Elizabeth Olsen – whose face sometimes calls to mind Maggie Gyllenhaal’s but whose body is squarer and shorter – is strongly expressive in the title role.  (Martha seems to use the name Marlene when she’s answering the phone in the communal house – although there’s another woman there called Marlene too:  see below.)  Martha is locked into her experiences in the Catskills but Olsen shows glints – in the cult as well as when she’s with Lucy and Ted – of a sociable, stable, unremarkable girl.  She manages to make Martha both stupefied and raw.  Sarah Paulson as Lucy is convincing as a woman who’s narrow-minded, however much she tries not to be.  (Lucy is trying to have a baby; when Martha yells at her that she’ll be a lousy mother it’s upsetting both because the hurtful remark reduces Lucy to tears and because you feel Martha’s likely to be right.)   Hugh Dancy is amusingly humour-free as Ted, especially in his uneasy attempts to laugh at Martha’s milder eccentricities:  he provides a witty relief from the prevailing grimness.

    There are two points at which Sean Durkin delivers shocks that seem to belong in a more conventional horror film – although the shocks are undeniable.   The cult members sometimes break into and steal from houses when the owners aren’t in or aren’t looking.   On one such break-in, the man of the house confronts the intruders.  After an edgy, menacing conversation with Patrick, they appear to be on the point of leaving.  Then one of the women (Marlene?) appears at the back of the frame.  It’s a familiar ‘Look behind you!’ moment but when she knifes the home owner in the back, it has impact because there’s been no comparable violence in the film until then.  In the final sequence, as Ted and Lucy drive Martha to the mental hospital in New York City, they narrowly avoid an accident with a car which then continues to tail them.  We recognise it as Patrick’s car.  Until this point we’ve assumed that her paranoid fears of the cult and that she can’t get away from it are all in Martha’s mind. The concluding image of Patrick’s car through the back window of Ted’s brings those fears into real life in a new way.  It supplies a scary jolt from which, because the film stops at this point, there’s no chance to recover.

    6 February 2012

  • Margot at the Wedding

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Noah Baumbach (2007)

    Margot (Nicole Kidman), a writer who lives in Manhattan, comes outstate with her son Claude (Zane Pais) for the wedding of her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), although the two sisters haven’t been on speaking terms for some time.  Pauline, who’s pregnant, and her groom-to-be Malcolm (Jack Black) live with Ingrid (Flora Cross), Pauline’s daughter from a previous relationship, in the family home left to Pauline by her mother (although we gather the mother’s still alive).  In the large grounds of the house, there’s an enormous tree, which Pauline’s hostile neighbours want to see removed.   The tree – sentimentally precious to Pauline and Margot (‘part of our childhood’) but soon identifiable as a whopping symbol of the deep-rooted antagonisms in their unhappy family – ends up horizontal, flattening the wedding marquee.  It doesn’t really matter because by that stage the wedding is off anyway.

    I’m glad I saw Greenberg (2010) before this film; if I’d seen Margot at the Wedding at the time of its release I doubt I’d have returned for more from Noah Baumbach.  I went back to the note on Greenberg to remind myself why I liked it and how it compares with Margot.  Both have selfish, hurtful protagonists with warped competitive instincts (although Margot, unlike Roger Greenberg, is professionally successful); the human beings closest to them get hurt the most.  Like most of the Baumbach oeuvre, both films feature dogs in peril.  It’s easy to accept they’re the work of the same director yet Greenberg is entertaining and incisive, Margot hateful and amorphous.  How did that happen?  The casting of the protagonist is one reason but not the whole story.  In Greenberg, Ben Stiller’s lightweight persona is used to great effect.  We’re surprised to see him playing a depressive; at the same time he exploits our idea of him as a shallow underdog both to express the character‘s superficiality and make us root for Roger Greenberg.  As the viciously neurotic Margot, Nicole Kidman is in one sense very well cast.  Her competitiveness as a performer is fused here with the woman she’s playing:  because Margot wants to win every interaction she has – with Claude, with Pauline, with Malcolm – it’s less obvious that Kidman is trying to get the better of the other actors.  It’s hard to fault what she does, except that she’s charmless – and Baumbach would hardly see that as a fault.

    Margot at the Wedding is described on Wikipedia as a ‘tragicomedy’.  Another contemporary film about a dysfunctional family and with a matrimonial setting, Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married (2008), genuinely merits that description but Margot is hardly a comedy at all.  It’s glumly misanthropic and Baumbach’s snippy dialogue is used mostly to intensify the gloom.  The opening sparring between Margot and Pauline, where determined affability and inevitable friction are finely, tensely balanced, draws you in.  And there’s the odd detail that seems comically promising – like Margot on the lookout for signs of autism the way different kinds of phobe used to spot Jews or gays on television.  In a good Woody Allen film, this kind of neurosis would be worked into the comic texture in a way that made it funny.  Here, it’s soon merely unpleasant.  (There’s another resonance with Allen when Pauline rails against Margot using their family as material for her writing:  it reminds you how acutely and enjoyably the same idea is handled in Hannah and Her Sisters.)

    Baumbach clearly isn’t interested in lightening the material by comic invention; what makes Margot such a lowering experience is that his screenplay doesn’t give the actors any real opportunity to penetrate their characters either.  Unlike in Greenberg, he fails either to sympathise with or to dramatise the central character’s corrosive egotism.  He does no more than assert, relentlessly, that people can be shitty and human relationships irreparable.  And much of the film, shot by Harris Savides, is so dark-toned that it’s sometimes hard to see what’s going on even physically.  This lack of lighting may be realistic but it gets to seem like an expression not only of Baumbach’s pessimism but of his inability to speak his mind through the characters and the story.  The film is both miasmic and impacted.

    The only thing that Baumbach really gets across is that venomous parents can poison their children.  (The Squid and the Whale (2005) did the same, although with more sophistication.)  Margot’s early teenage son Claude is hapless chiefly because he adores his mother, who appears to be turning him into an androgynous blob.  Zane Pais is somewhat affecting as Claude – but in an uncomfortable way because it’s Pais’s own physical qualities which Baumbach uses to express Claude’s plight.   It seems that whenever someone threatens to be likeable, Baumbach resorts to making them contemptible through their ridiculous appearance.  Jack Black does creditably as Pauline’s fiancé Malcolm (like Roger Greenberg, a man bitterly resenting his failure to make it in the world of rock music) but when Margot tells her sister that Malcolm’s wrong for her you tend to agree – not least because he looks so garishly silly.  Malcolm confesses to Pauline that he’s had it off with Maisy (Halley Feiffer), the daughter of their malignant neighbour Dick Koosman (Ciaran Hinds), who’s also a professional associate of Margot (and the main reason she bothered to come for the wedding at all).  Baumbach finds it necessary to have Malcolm break down abjectly – into blubbering blubber, unworthy of sympathy largely because the sight of him is alienating.   The director seems anxious to thwart his characters even in their bid to win the nastiness stakes.   Dick Koosman delivers such an expert low blow when he interviews Margot in front of an audience – he asks if the paedophile father she’s presented in one of her stories is, rather than a portrait of her own father, a self-portrait – that she’s reduced to stumbling, helpless tears.

    Canine trauma is coming to seem a litmus test in Baumbach pictures.  In Greenberg, Roger tends his brother’s ailing Alsatian and the dog recovers:  it’s Roger’s most successful relationship.   In Margot, as the tensions between the people get worse, the family mongrel Wizard disappears.  When things have got even worse, Margot, who’s met up briefly with her ex-husband (John Turturro), has a roadside encounter with the distraught owner of a different dog that’s been hit by a car and is gravely injured.   Wizard eventually comes home, unharmed though looking the worse for wear, just as the tree is about to topple.   That’s the last we see of the dog.  I wasn’t sure if he ended up in the same position as the marquee although Sally thought I was being unduly pessimistic.

    4 February 2011

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