Shame (2011) *****/*****
Leading up to the release of this movie an increasing amount of attention has been given to its sexually explicit content and the amount of nudity that gets shown by its lead actors. If you’ll forgive just this one pun; that’s a shame. Being fortunate enough to see Shame at a festival, just a week after its world premiere, I got to take it in before all of the controversy and hoopla began, and I wish that were something everyone got to experience. So let’s just get all of this out of the way early. Yes, there is a lot of sex in this movie. Yes, you see Michael Fassbender’s penis. Yes, you see Carey Mulligan’s boobs and vagina. No, you don’t see them as often or as long as you would imagine you’re going to based on all the hype. And no, all of that is certainly not the point of the film. This movie explores deep themes, it builds complex characters, it’s masterful at creating mood and building tension. Shame is the kind of filmgoing experience that leaves you breathless, that makes a theater full of 1700 people file out in silence after the end credits, still fully enveloped in its world. It really is high art, and everyone involved, especially director Steve McQueen and stars Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, should be commended.
Before stepping into film directing, McQueen was an artist in other mediums, and that influence shows in the way he’s willing to experiment with the camera and break from the standard techniques of shooting. The frames of this movie are all gorgeous, but they never feel blocked or staged. McQueen just sticks to the strategy of hiring talented actors, letting them go, and then experimenting with the best ways to capture what they’re doing while it’s all happening. It feels like he’s doing the visual version of an Apatow movie’s improvisational dialogue. After his first film, Hunger, it became clear that this was a director more interested in telling his story visually, through his camera work and through his actor’s physical performances, than he was through dialogue; and that approach carries over to Shame. This is a film that has long stretches of silence, but every single second something important is happening on screen.
McQueen is also a photographer who is willing to let his camera sit still on a subject and let a scene play out. He had that twenty-some minute still shot of two men talking at a table in Hunger, and he goes back to the still shot well once again here, and once again to great effect. Doing lengthy still shots takes balls and it takes patience, and if McQueen keeps going back to them too often they might become something of an annoyance over the course of his career, but so far I’ve enjoyed all the choices he’s made quite a bit. He’s picked the right moments to linger on, moments essential to the heart of the stories he’s telling, and the additional attention a still shot is able to give them feels like the perfect amount of spotlight to shine. Pay attention when you’re watching this movie, notice when the camera isn’t moving at all, and chances are what you’re watching is going to be very important. Not many people could pull this off, but so far McQueen hasn’t let me down.
Shame is a character study, focusing on a man named Brandon (Fassbender) who is almost crippled with sexual addiction. He watches pornography constantly, hires prostitutes regularly, visits dingy sex clubs, and sizes up every woman he comes across, every second of the day, as potential prey. His is a story that could only be told in modern times, where our relationships with sexuality have been warped by the too ready availability of too explicit pornography on the Internet. Brandon bombards himself with graphic sexual images all day long, he numbs himself to them, and then he tries to recreate them as best he can with whores and random hookups. His home is a pristine shrine to sex and masturbation, never disturbed other than by faceless partners. When Brandon tries to have a sexual relationship with a woman he’s had a meal with, a woman he’s talked to and worked alongside, it doesn’t work out. And when his masturbatorium is disturbed by his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) looking for a place to crash, the challenge of having someone around that he has to relate to in a non-sexual framework causes Brandon to have a series of frustrated outbursts that lead to a full-blown mental breakdown.
Fassbender’s focus and intensity in this role is nothing to ignore, but it comes as no surprise. Very quickly he’s establishing himself as one of the best currently working actors, and with McQueen he’s found a director willing to use his talents as the centerpiece of gorgeous productions. This film is, top to bottom, all about Fassbender’s performance; where he can take us emotionally, and how he can engage us fully with his character. Mulligan, another of this new generation’s very finest actors, is also predictably engaging as Sissy. She’s very open and vulnerable in this role, in direct opposition to the way Fassbender’s repressed Brandon interacts with people, and it becomes clear from the second that she steps into the story that her openness is going to get her hurt and cause a break in Brandon’s very particular routine. While this film is firmly Fassbender’s, his interactions with Mulligan are an important part of how Brandon develops and where he ends up going on his journey, and I can’t imagine two more perfect actors for these jobs. They rise to every occasion and pull off absolutely everything that is asked of them. When Brandon reaches his crisis point, when you get indication that something major has changed inside of him by the film’s end: you buy it. You buy it completely, and it’s because of the work done by the actors.
My one complaint about the film lies in Fassbender’s series of sex scenes. We get a lot of them, they’re fairly graphic, and they contain a lot of nudity; but their inclusion wasn’t my problem. My complaint is in how legitimately sexy they were. Fassbender and his series of prostitutes are having hot, satisfying sex. While he’s able to convey his character’s extreme focus during sexual situations, Fassbender appears to relish his encounters far too much. I felt like they should have been more robotic and dispassioned, to convey how far into addiction he had slipped. Every other scene in this movie presents Brandon’s relationship to his sexuality as creepy and wrong-headed. There is nothing healthy about the way he is behaving. He’s giving in to compulsion rather than indulging in hedonism, so I thought it was a bit of a disservice to the character to shoot his encounters so sensually. The sex scenes we get seem like they were meant more to make the audience feel shame than Brandon, and in my mind the situation should have been reversed.
The occasional shameful boner aside, Shame is mostly a complex, beautiful piece of art. The subject it explores is one that’s relevant to the experience of modern man, and it shouldn’t be shied away from because it’s a little bit uncomfortable to think about. Our relationship to sexuality, the way we think about it, and the way we portray it in the media, is getting more and more warped at a faster and faster rate every year. The media is sexualizing our children at increasingly younger ages. It presents us increasingly more often with solely the crass, dysfunctional side of sexual expression, for the purpose of earning shock ratings. The problem is, like a junkie increasing his doses, the shock is wearing off. It’s getting to the point where we’re so inundated with images of sexual dysfunction that the dysfunctions are becoming the norms. More and more our emotional responses to sexual situations are getting tied to feelings of power and anger, and less and less are they being related to feelings of tenderness and intimacy. Shame is asking big questions, it’s dealing with important issues, so you shouldn’t let its NC-17 rating deter you from watching it. This is in no way shock, schlock, or exploitation. Shame is about as legitimate as cinema gets.
One footnote: I would feel bad if I didn’t mention the one scene where Brandon actually goes out on a real date. It’s one of the most subtle, masterful pieces of comedy I’ve seen in a film in as long as I can remember, and all of the humor comes from the fact that they have a very bad waiter. The jokes are so subtle, and such little spotlight is put on them that many people might not even notice they’re there at all. But they’re hilarious, and whoever played that waiter should be commended. The whole scene felt like something out of the Coen brothers’ screwball playbook.
