Shame

Film: Shame
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan
Directed By: Steve McQueen (no, not that one, a different one)
Written By: Abi Morgan and Steve McQueen (still the other one)
Produced By: Iain Canning and Emile Sherman
Distributor: Fox Searchlight
Rating: NC-17
Running Time: Approximately 101 minutes
Website: foxsearchlight.com/shame/
Budget: $6,500,000
Genre: Drama
Release Date: February 10, 2012

The New York of Shame is a discomfiting one, full of the typical glass towers and power lunches one imagines the throbbing heart of Manhattan to contain.  Many of the key sequences of the movie are shot in long, uninterrupted takes, and in them we see this version of New York: endless avenues, elegant restaurants, and posh nightclubs.  But those scenes, as often as they show the sublime of the endlessly self-perpetuating myth of New York, also reveal other things about the city. Shame’s New York is a glamorous one, but it’s also one where any desire can be met, as long as one isn’t too choosy about how and where one finds it.

In this glittering, complex world navigates Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender of A Dangerous Method and X-Men: First Class).  Brandon, an executive at a non-specific  Manhattan office, maintains a stylish apartment and lands his choice of women with alarming regularity and little effort beyond affixing them with his handsome gaze.  Brandon’s escapades aren’t limited to one-night stands, nor is their frequency close to enough.  He engages in any number of paid and/or self-stimulating activities throughout any given day: he pleasures himself in the bathroom at work, has standing “dates” with prostitutes and web cam girls, and has computers stuffed with downloaded pornography.  He lives a life constant stimulation but zero engagement.

Into Brandon’s life comes—that’s a poor choice of words—into Brandon’s life arrives his estranged sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan, Drive).  Sissy, coming off the latest disastrous relationship in which she was overinvested, needs a place to stay. Sissy has her own intimacy issues (the scars on her wrists aren’t for show), but works steadily as a nightclub singer.  Sissy crashes at Brandon’s, and her intrusion into the carefully constructed cocoon of Brandon’s life begins to unravel his previously hidden predilections.  Beneath Brandon’s deliberately composed surface is just damage, and his rampant sexual addiction is but the symptom.

As presumable from the subject matter, Shame gets pretty graphic in its depiction of Brandon’s sexual wantonness, from dirty talk to commonplace nudity (Fassbender himself is frequently on display, which means exactly what you think it means).  As pervasive as it is, the sex and nudity is rarely titillating, indicative as it is of Brandon’s submerged psychosis.  It truly is an addiction for him, a continuous circuit that allows him to avoid intimacy by giving him the illusion of “intimacy.”  In fact, for a movie about a subject matter that’s anything but subtle, Shame is full of surprisingly low-key moments.  The aforementioned long takes that pop up regularly for significant scenes put on display a different emotion each time, from Sissy’s mesmerizing lounge-act rendition of “New York, New York” to Brandon’s epically awkward attempt at a real date.  Shame is about discomfort, and the lengths we go to avoid confronting the causes of that discomfort.

Director/co-writer/guy-who-should-rethink-his-name Steve McQueen creates in Brandon and Sissy two characters unable to cope with their damage.  Much like Gary Oldman in Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, Fassbender’s performance is all about control; unlike Oldman, Fassbender’s Brandon bursts at the seams in a few telling moments of white-hot, uncontrollable emotion.  He’s fearless throughout.  Fassbender is matched by Mulligan’s wounded Sissy, and between them they craft a relationship riddled with unspoken trauma and doubt.  Together, they shamble through their two New Yorks, the world of glamor and righteousness they sleepwalk through and the shadow side that speaks to the urges that can never be sated.

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