The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011)

With its blocky opening narration and almost immediate diagnosis of hopelessness, Alexander Payne's The Descendants seems destined to hobble itself out of the gate, with not even its parched wit capable of saving it. Slowly, however, it emerges one of the most honest, least insistent films Hollywood has ever made on the subject of saying goodbye, with all its regrets, frustrations and revelations both welcome and unwelcome. Payne, who co-wrote the adaption of Kaui Hart Hemmings' novel with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, uses the few plot hinges merely to explore the contours of human reaction to a tragedy, making for one of the most subtle, interior movies I've ever seen get greeted with almost universal, instant praise.

The title refers to the unexpected ancestry of protagonist Matt King (George Clooney), a lawyer who resides in Oahu. King is the descendant of Hawaiian royalty, a princess who married a white missionary. And as he explains to the audience, his lineage gives him and his extended family ownership of a 25,000-acre land trust, which is set to expire in seven years. Rather than wait for the land to legally fade from their hands, his cousins want to sell the property for development, making them all extremely rich. Matt, the trustee of the land, is all on-board with this plan, until a boating accident leaves his wife in a permanent coma and changes the way he thinks about everything.

I say permanent coma without fear of spoiling, for the film openly states the hopelessness of Liz's condition within the first 10 minutes. The Descendants is not a film about the possibility of everything going back to normal but of making peace, of reassessing one's life and finding ways to cope with dramatic upheavals. And by deliberately preventing any kind of Hail Mary finale that miraculously restores Liz to full health, Payne and co. take away the safety net, ensuring that the emotional tumult Matt and the other characters endure is not for nothing.

Clooney gives what may be his best performance as Matt, whose conflicted attitudes toward his family only make the strain of Liz's accident harder. Matt is so stressed that even his narration is stand-offish. His first words in voiceover mock the views of those who think that life in Hawaii is magically better when he's watching his wife die in a hospital. "Paradise?" he hisses rhetorically. "Paradise can go fuck itself." Often absent with work, Matt must suddenly shoulder the responsibility of his two daughters: 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), both of whom nurse their own issues regarding their family. Scottie gets out her feelings over her mom's condition by showing photos of her to disturbed classmates and bullying the other children. Alex, on the other hand, knows a secret about her mother that drove a wedge between them just before the accident, tearing her between hatred for her mother and anguish at this turn of events.

Payne's film manages to capture these conflicting, often contradictory, reactions with clear humor but also a masterful grace that suggests a peak for the writer-director, who has never put forward the nuance and full emotional range of his characters so strongly. In another film, one could accuse the constant shifting of character relations and behaviors to be the sign of characters remolded for plot convenience. But by largely stripping away the plot from this story, Payne illuminates the messiness of grief, the way it wracks us with anger one second, sadness the next, and how people make armistices with each other even as they find new enemies. Payne trusts his audience to follow the erratic but never arbitrary emotional arcs of his characters, and anyone remotely paying attention will understand completely how Alex can be so belligerent to her father when they reunite yet almost become his partner when the two go searching for answers about Liz's life.

The most classical of modern movie stars, Clooney has always been solid in a literal sense, physically and emotionally. He confines his tears to a few quiet moments, away from others, almost away from the camera itself. The narrow range of expression Clooney allows himself makes Matt's feelings hard to place, leaving his erratic actions to suggest the play of thoughts tugging at the poor man. The fraying lawyer can scream his grievances at his comatose and turn around and slap his daughter for doing the same mere seconds later, able to vent in private but refusing to let his children be jaded as he is. Writing about what Clooney does here is extremely hard, because he doesn't use any of the tics actors employ for this stock kind of performance. He doesn't tremble, doesn't act outwardly aggressive, doesn't go numb. Instead, he deals with each reaction as it hits him, even if they're only seconds apart, but he also continues to operate in the world around him, not retreating as such characters often do.

But Clooney isn't the only standout here. Besides the two fantastic performances by the actresses playing Matt's daughters, The Descendants boasts a number of character actors putting in fantastic work. Nick Krause initially takes up space as Alex's spaced-out, rude boyfriend, but a small exchange between Matt and Sid late in the film completely alters the way Matt (and the audience) perceives the boy, and Krause doesn't have to change his performance at all to handle the shift. Beau Bridges appears as a cousin looking for that payout from the land trust deal, the kind of affable burnout so lively and easygoing you never feel as sorry for him as you probably should. Best of all is Robert Forster, who plays Matt's father-in-law but just as easily could be Matt's dad for how completely Forster taps into Clooney's wavelength. Forster essentially acts out the film in miniature, experiencing the full emotional range in only a few minutes of divided screen time. He, too, holds his tears, but he does not hold his tongue, and his vicious rants put Matt and Alex in their place just when they start to absolve themselves of any culpability in their positions.

Indeed, in its elegant view of grief, The Descendants also broaches the subject of responsibility and the need to settle one's affairs, even if they are of one's family. Matt must contend not only with his dying wife and his troubled children but that trust of land passed down through generations until those who own it not only don't look Hawaiian but cannot speak the language. But they were still entrusted with it, demanding more than just financial considerations in its handling. That point is humanized at the film's climax when Judy Greer's character must handle an issue of her husband's that proves the most harrowing moment of the movie. It is precisely these mature actions that make the seemingly sorrowful ending one of hope and affirmation, confirming this as Alexander Payne's best work to date and one of the finest American productions in years.

Page One: Inside the New York Times (Andrew Rossi, 2011)

Forget the title: Page One: Inside the New York Times quickly establishes a protagonist, and it is not the hallowed (and expensively redecorated) halls of the Gray Lady. It is David Carr, the Times' media reporter and knight in shining armor for anyone trying to justify journalism as a relevant career in the 21st century. A former crack addict who put his life back together and even raised two kids by himself, Carr has a personal history that could make for an Oscar-baiter, but the forcefulness of his cigarette-ravaged voice makes an instant impression that instantly steals the show from Andrew Rossi's intended overview of the Times and the state of journalism at large.

Page One deals with the uncertain fate of America's most prestigious newspaper, and the print media in general, as news aggregates, technological innovations and simple mismanagement threaten to topple an entire industry. But all I cared about was seeing Carr blaze into action in debates with upstart pygmies looking to throw the last spear into print's dying white elephant, his airy rasp condescending to the likes of Shane Smith of Vice, Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos, and Michael Wolff of Newser. Each walks into an argument with confidence bordering on arrogance, and Carr slices them all to ribbons. Whatever the Times pays him to write, he's worth it just to be the rock star spokesman for that old journalistic spirit. He may have a headset, an active Twitter account and a brand-name coffee always in hand, but Carr captures the spirit of the papermen as seen in classic movies: witty, unrelenting, but fair, albeit perfectly willing to hang you if you tied your own noose.

So captivating is Carr that, when he's offscreen, Page One comes to resemble No Nukes outside the show-stopping Springsteen performance. The banal minutiae of goings on at the Times is really no different from any other workplace, which is presumably the point of Rossi's film but also a problem when it comes to making the life of a journalist seem compelling. Part of Carr's defense of traditional media is the network of reporters who put themselves in harm's way to collect information, and we even see a business reporter, Tim Aragno, volunteer to replace departing writers at the Times' bureau in Baghdad (he's now the chief of that bureau). But Rossi never particularly stresses the bravery of that, of going into a war zone with a notepad and a camera, where U.S. troops are as likely to resent you as the indigenous population.

But then, Rossi doesn't do much to go into the Times' key failings, either. He gives space for both the Jayson Blair fiasco and Judith Miller's horrid reporting before the Iraq invasion, where her unthinking parroting of government-fed info was used by the Bush administration as proof of WMDs in Iraq. Just as Miller acted as stenographer for Bush, so too does Rossi faithfully report the Times' own party line on these disasters, which attributes them to individual oversights, not flaws in their model. This despite the fact that an archival interview shows the previous editor inadvertently revealing that the Times has no real antibody system to monitor itself for irregularities. The film also treats the larger problem of journalism's revenue problem as something wholly out of the hands of the print industry. Ignoring the PR issue journalism is having with the American people (whether it is justified or trumped-up), Rossi's subjects merely insist that the move of readers and ad revenue to the Internet unfairly undercut these prestigious businesses, No one even points out the ludicrous waste of the Times' new building, an ostentatious gallery clearly meant to show off the old-school class of the paper when the millions of dollars it cost might have been saved to keep at least a portion of the 100+ workers we see laid off during the film.

That Carr can obliterate all these quibbles with his mere presence is only further evidence to his abilities as a showman and kind of born again believer in print. He represents the Times at its best, mixing his dogged abilities as a talented, even-handed but probing writer with his quickly developed fondness for pooh-poohed modernizations like Twitter. He also spearheads the film's strongest section, the Times' reaction to the Tribune Company filing for bankruptcy. The sabotaging of a major print conglomerate by its buffoonish, businessman heads brings out the claws in the reporters, who clearly are so tired of fending off threats from outside that they will not tolerate those from within. The details Carr uncovers about the disgusting frat house atmosphere of Sam Zell's and Randy Michaels' running of Tribune Co. are horrific, and the disgust that creeps into Carr's chats with that company's employees is frightening in its outrage.

But the fact that the most inflamed anyone gets in this movie is when dealing with the navel-gazing of the media reporting on its own demise speaks to some of the problems traditional journalism is having in keeping an audience. While I believe the media should keep tabs on itself (it might have prevented those Blair and Miller episodes if done properly), we live in a time of unending, international-level news, and for the reporters here to get more up in arms about poker games at the Trib than lies in Iraq is distressing. Just listen to some Times writers cover their asses when Wikileaks gets the scoop over everyone; one guy insists that the now-infamous edited video "Collateral Murder" is propagandizing falsehood, only to stammer out yet more justification for the Establishment when someone points out that Wikileaks posted the full video and it doesn't particularly exonerate the U.S. military. The film makes a strong case for the necessity of, if not print media itself, at least the network of bureaus and standards it created. But for all the anger the subjects show toward internal attacks on journalism, Page One never truly considers the extent to which papers got themselves into this mess in the first place.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011)

Expanding upon the style that brought him international fame with 2008's Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson makes a chilly, claustrophobic character drama out of John Le Carré's classic spy thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This is even more impressive considering that the film primarily takes place in vast sets colored in warm, oaken browns (albeit the kind Joyce used to signify death and ossification). Alfredson's vampire film similarly used its expansive white space to actually constrict the frame, and here he goes one step further, swapping out intense but myopic angst for loyalty fears with global consequences. Where youth merely think the whole world is against them, it truly could be if one of these spies slips up, hence why the members of the organization seem to spend more time monitoring each other than anything going on in Russia.

Reveling in his period setting, Alfredson nevertheless, as he did with the 1981-set Let the Right One In, transcends it, presenting Soviet fears and immaculately recreated fashion and design while also crafting a self-contained world with those tools that speaks to more universal, timeless issues. Stylistically, Alfredson has made perhaps the quintessential spy aesthetic: he particularly uses his early-'70s setting for the preponderance of smoking, with numerous shots blanketed in nicotine fogs. But then his elegant camera pulls back to reveal almost Tatiesque structures of giant, voyeuristic windows, also relying often on reflections and even 180-degree rule breaks to stress reversals and the possibility of double agents. To match Le Carré's narrative of ferreting out moles, Alfredson literally uses smoke and mirrors, neither of which can obscure those massive, transparent windows that bare everyone's personal lives to all surveillance.

Boiling down Le Carré's dense text to its gist, Tinker Tailor concerns the possibility of a Russian mole inside British intelligence in 1973. Before his (natural, it should be said) death, the head of the "Circus," codenamed Control (John Hurt), suspected one of the higher-ups in the organization of feeding information to the Kremlin. A botched mission to recover the name of that person in Hungary only confirms something is wrong, but before he can do anything else, Control finds himself forced out of the service by the same ambitious up-and-comers who roused his concerns over a leak in the Circus.

With Control's passing, the civilian overseer of the Circus brings the old man's friend, George Smiley (Gary Oldman), out of retirement to investigate the case. Originally written to be the realistic "anti-Bond" by the actual spy Le Carré, Smiley lets Oldman display another facet to his acting. Known primarily for his explosive, grandiose screen presence, Oldman here plays a mild, calm, unremarkable man who looks almost genetically predisposed to bureaucracy. With a soft voice and glasses so huge they actually mask his eyes and recast his flat, unexpressive lips as toad-like, Oldman looks like a grandfather, not a master spy capable of sussing out a double agent without even setting foot in the Circus. Yet Oldman merely subsumes his old intensity, never having to raise his voice or even whisper forcefully to let the audience know that his look of banal normalcy is a carefully calculated front. It's the most gripping performance the actor has given in ages, all the more impressive for its thorough restraint.

Reducing the novel to a two-and-a-half-hour film necessitates a sharp cutting of plot, turning an already complicated story into a potential labyrinth of unspoken clues. I confess I got lost a few times along the way before finding my way back and wondering how I'd ever gotten sidetracked. But Alfredson never lets the overall atmosphere fade, and indeed the structure becomes useful for more than just parading around an all-star cast of British talent. It places the entire work in opposition to the Bond mythos, of an id-driven übermensch who could shoot and screw his way into the most impregnable fortress. The spy work of Tinker Tailor is a group effort, with each person responsible for different things and also affected by their own hangups, desires and fears. One character (played by a youthful-looking but harrowed Tom Hardy),  not only has to deal with being listed as a defector but with the disappearance of his Russian lover Irina, whose peril wracks him with worry.

That mingling of the political and the personal is where the film best succeeds. Alfredson frames the narrative in unexpectedly emotional terms, exposing national affiliations to be just as narrowly focused yet passionately felt as the longing and teenage anomie of Let the Right One In. Even his visualization of Smiley's wife's adultery is more mournful than outlandish, and its importance to the final reveal only seals the link between turncoat treason and intimate backstabbing. I actually found myself on the verge of tears with a murder in the dénouement, an act framed from start to finish not with tension but sorrow, a grieving for inflicted pain that includes the regret of the revenge itself. This approach tempers the fun the director has with the plot's convoluted structure and his voyeuristic dollhouse aesthetic, giving it a serious bedrock that makes its charms more fully rewarding. In a year with so many huge statements from artists, Alfredson's film is a subtle subversion of everything we expect from its genre, one made all the more irresistible for its focus on character over mechanics.

Dinner for Schmucks: Present Continuous

The opening scene of this movie is memorable and perfect for beginners to practice the present continuous tense. The instructions of the game are simple, but you had better model it, instead of giving the instructions in written form.





Game:

I. Divide the class into groups of 3 students. Watch the movie segment and take notes of all the leisure activities the mice are doing in that afternoon.





II. Get together with your group and write down as many sentences as you can, saying what the mice are doing. You have 10 minutes to do it.





III. Read all your sentences to the class. Every sentence with both correct grammar and information, according to the segment, scores 1 point. The winner is the group that scores most points.


IV. You may watch the segment again to check whether the leisure activities are correct.


OR

I. Cut the sentences into slips and place them in a box.

II. students take turns to pick up a sentence and mime it to their own group. The group has 15 seconds to guess the correct sentence and score a point.

V. Talk to a partner:


1. Which activities you saw in the segment do you like to do in your leisure time?

2. Which ones don't you like to do?



WORKSHEET


MOVIE SEGMENT - DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS

The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987)

Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject. Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison. However, its first flashback, of the deposed emperor ascending the throne as a child, swaps out the drabness for soft yellow tones so warm they become suffocating. Communist China may hold no quarter for the last emperor, but the sheltered, obsolete world into which Pu Yi comes to briefly rule is just as incompatible for a child of the 20th century.

Made with an unprecedented level of cooperation by the Chinese government, The Last Emperor provides a mournful microcosm for the upheaval of the early 20th century. Still a toddler afraid to be separated from his mother and bonded with his wet nurse, Pu Yi is suddenly a god to the eunuchs and concubines, who must treat this child as such even as they attempt to handle his age-appropriate tempers and playfulness. But his status as a supreme being only truly applies to the walls of the vast but finite palace in which he lives. The film's first half remains within the Forbidden City until its gargantuan size feels claustrophobic, the sounds of rapid social change in surrounding Peking buzzing with inevitability. Eventually that world will shatter Pu Yi's own, allowing Bertolucci to fully explore his passion for national and sexual politics as the emperor, like China itself, makes up for centuries of static social systems with tumultuous changes in a short period of time.

Bertolucci's graceful camera, aided by the gorgeous cinematography of longtime collaborator Vittorio Storaro, captures Pu Yi's childhood with a clear sense of irony. The selfish toddler does not fully understand his role, only that it means he can do whatever he wants, and it's amusing to see his handlers trying to calm the rambunctious child down without be able to make any kind of physical contact or issue any command—who, after all, can order around an emperor? Yet forces still restrict the child, especially the old courtesans who gather in Pu Yi's vicinity but never quite his presence—they typically not not share a shot with the emperor, and when they do they are separated by some kind of frame, which only makes them further resemble living portraits of long-dead, long-outdated ancestral voices. When the women see the ties between Pu Yi and his wet nurse lingering for too long, they expel the woman. And while the boy continues to play around the palace, those in charge of handling his affairs give up his royal authority in the wake of nationalist rebellions. As an adviser sadly informs the child, he remains emperor inside the Forbidden City, "but not outside."

By intercutting between the palace and the internment center, Bertolucci demonstrates that the emperor has only ever really known prison. The only difference between the Forbidden City and the center in Fushun is that his captors in the former pretended to obey him while scheming and plotting in the real world, while at least the Maoist wardens and guards treat him directly. And as much as John Lone's face communicates anguish and shame as the adult Pu Yi, it also contains traces of contentment, even relief, not seen in the character's younger incarnations. Here he is finally just another person, which is what he wanted all along, even when he recoiled at the first tastes of that commonality.

But there is still a 40-year gap between these early flashbacks and the present, and Bertolucci uses the details of Pu Yi's life in the intervening years to clarify the forces at work on the Chinese mindset. As the emperor, the lad is already at a disadvantage, even more backward than his peasants. Trapped in the one place where he can still behave as a monarch, Pu Yi belatedly Westernizes, ignorant of the ravages of Western influence on his empire. His people are already flirting with the Reds in Russia, and by the time Japan offers him puppet rule of Manchuria, he's out of step with the nationalist movement that resists the takeover. Even the Scottish tutor who becomes a trusted friend (Peter O'Toole) recognizes how behind the emperor is, though he only voices his concerns to the other advisers. Pu Yi never can catch up, and his attempts to modernize only alienate him from everyone.

That separation carries over to the man's sexual life, which is at once woefully outdated and more open than modern couples can enjoy. While in a port city just before his faux-reascension, Pu Yi and his two wives mingle at a party, where one of the women dances with an American and tells him that she is "wife number two." The American, so brash and flirtatious, blanches at this information, barely able to stammer out a, "Some guys have all the luck." But Pu Yi did not really get to choose either, and his consort was actually his pick for the handful of politically rewarding options given to him (his second choice was more fortuitous, hence her being the empress). Likewise, his wives begin to chafe after the expulsion from the Forbidden City, forced to deal not merely with the loss of station but the sudden meaninglessness of their designations. Bertolucci tied sex to power with The Conformist, which mingled homosexuality and fascism, and Pu Yi's lack of power—and subsequently hollow "reascension"—seem to completely kill his sex drive, while the women find more extreme ways to cope.

Nevertheless, for the clear sympathy the director shows to his subject, Bertolucci subverts the emperor's perception of his real tribulations. The aforementioned suffocation of the Forbidden City makes his omnipotence within its walls ironic, and his dealings with the Japanese are no better. In fact, a shot changes color tones when his handlers calmly but forcibly set Pu Yi straight on the farce of his rule of Manchukuo, the frame turning an icy blue-white. Bertolucci, an acknowledged Marxist, does not cover up the violence and subjugation of Communist China—he pointedly links the coded discipline of those within the Forbidden City to that of the soldiers taking political prisoners—but he does suggest a beneficial side effect. After his "successful" conversion to Communist ideals in the holding center, Pu Yi is released a decade later, and when we see him at the end, he seems to have found some measure of contentment. He even identifies himself as a gardener to a soldier, his past life as a monarch totally behind him. Unmistakable is the implication that the former is more meaningful and fulfilling than the latter.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, 2011)

I have always defended cynicism, even outright despair, as a valid form of creative expression from those who feel that all art must affirm. One cannot tell an artist how to feel, and to deny very real human emotions from the artistic equation, or to insist that those emotions be subsumed into a more palatable conclusion, is naïve nonsense. But Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkin's feature debut, displays such tawdry, put-upon nihilism that I would have preferred the most reality-blind Hollywood cheese to its technically immaculate wallowing.

The title refers to three names the protagonist uses at different times over the course of the film, "Marcy May" joining two of the words into one rustic sobriquet. Her real name is Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), a title she gets back upon escaping a cult in upstate New York and contacting her estranged sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson). Despite sporting a bruised ear and audibly trembling when she calls Lucy for help, Martha does not get taken to a hospital, the police, or even a therapist. Instead, Lucy and her husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), bring Martha back to their vacation home in Connecticut where they behave as if everything is now instantly back to normal. But as flashbacks illuminate what happened to the younger sister, the belligerent attitudes of all three in the present become not merely grating but noxious, and Martha Marcy May Marlene quickly establishes itself as a movie in which things only ever get worse, not for dark comedy but plodding, hopelessly tedious stabs at psychological drama.

It should be said, however, that Durkin has a not inconsiderable skill with a camera. Weaving together the two time lines with match cuts so harmonic they become less counterpoints than one undulating line, Durkin at least knows what he's talking about when it comes to cults. With each new revelation, we see not only the horrors inflicted upon Martha and the other women of Patrick's (a terrifying John Hawkes) clan but how they become complicit in the crimes inflicted upon the next batch of recruits initiated into the "family." Likewise, Martha's inability to shake her dependence on Patrick continues to wreak mental havoc as Ted and Lucy selfishly fail to understand the gravity of the situation.

Hawkes' Patrick hangs over the whole film, even in his absence. Gathering runaways and emotionally vulnerable youths to his hidden farm, Hawkes lures his captives with the promise of fixing them, of helping them beat addictions, to find the love they never felt as children. But Hawkes, who looks as haggard and lethal as he did in last year's Winter's Bone, always carries a trace of ulterior motives made increasingly plain as he remolds these people into his slaves. His playful act of giving pet names to all who join becomes merely his first step of eliminating each member's old identity, cutting that person off from thoughts of one's past to ensure that Patrick becomes his or her whole world. The effect is so complete that even Martha, who fled him in terror, continues to spout his teachings and worldview to her bewildered (and increasingly impatient) sister.

But the same structure that makes Martha Marcy May Marlene such a striking technical achievement also turns its potential insight into such complex psychological scars by parceling out information as if leaving a trail of bread crumbs, an approach clearly meant to draw out the audience but so shamelessly forward about it that I broke quickly and often from the narrative. Rather than build tension, Durkin's narrative just throws an endless number of intended gut punches designed to jolt the crowd. Furthermore, by framing the story this way, the writer-director puts all of the emphasis on the revelations themselves, not their after-effects. The moments of understanding and depth he brings to Martha's brainwashing eventually give way to a narrative too in love with its own curveballs.

Yet Durkin still clearly thinks he's delving into his characters, generating a severe pacing problem between its perceived character analysis and its actual adherence to thriller structures. This leaves the film dramatically inert, robbing some of the later, crucial events of both their immediacy and their ripple effect. The characters stagnate as well, with Lucy and Ted continuing to act so self-involved that one almost welcomes the danger they flirt with by not rushing to get Martha help. By the same token, Martha falls into such a static trap of sloth and cruelty that the unending string of new horrors unearthed by the flashbacks begin to resemble a desperate attempt to keep the audience engaged with this locked-up character and to keep sympathizing with her terrible behavior.

Perhaps Durkin feels as if his dead air is evocative, creating atmosphere by virtue of its lethargy. This view would certainly be backed up by the ridiculous ending, which some have inexplicably called ambiguous because it is not explicit, despite there being only one clear outcome for the final shot. The cast give it their all, particularly Olsen, Paulson and Hawkes, but Durkin cares not to use his clever structuring or his ominously washed-out aesthetic to delve into the issues he broaches but merely to writhe around in all the evils and pain that hit these characters. It is a wasted opportunity, one that turns an initially gripping and mysterious view of a traumatized person's attempts to reintegrate into normal society into a plot-heavy bore. But like Olsen, who lines her beautiful, youthful face with prematurely aging furrows of terror and insurmountable rewiring, Durkin does display enough talent with his feature debut to warrant keeping a tab on his future endeavors. Let us just hope they work better than this hollow exercise.

Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011)

Michael Fassbender only just exploded on the international scene a few years ago, but to see him in Shame, one half expects him to keel over any second. After coming to everyone's attention as the physically emaciated IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen's debut Hunger, Fassbender re-teams with the director to play a spiritually hollowed figure. The soullessness of sex addict Brandon pokes through the actor's buff frame, turning his pale flesh gray, his lined face turned skeletal with self-consuming lust. It is a deeply unsettling performance, one that uses Fassbender's attractive physicality and body language against itself to make every seductive pose more predatory than smoldering.

McQueen and editor Joe Walker establish the prison Brandon has erected around himself with a circular opening defined by the harsh sounds of a light switch turned on after nights of carnal pleasures, the disgusted whipping back of blinds to let in the light of the world from which Brandon hides, and the grinding subway train where he scopes out potential conquests on his way to work. As he hungrily gazes upon a married woman who struggles vainly against his devilish spell, the audience sees Brandon's routine of sex, be it hiring prostitutes, watching Internet porn or masturbating at work. So effective is the opening that mere wisps of recurring images—such as the bathroom door at work—instantly trigger graphic memories. But that closed-loop cutting only locks the film itself into the icy bourgeois surroundings of its protagonist, allowing McQueen to show off without having to do anything with his technical skill.

In no time, the visual suggestions stack up with such overbearing insistence that McQueen undermines his atmosphere of necrosis with "Get it, folks?" desperation. A street signal bent out of shape flashes "walk" as Brandon jogs in place, turning to the red hand as he resumes his run. After picking up the businesswoman his married boss pathetically hit on at a bar, the two screw against a concrete wall with "Fuck" scrawled above them. Motifs of Brandon's yuppie trappings fill the gaps, especially his laptop, which he seems to own solely to download porn and live chat with stripteasers. Having so quickly set up his protagonist, his style and his mood with the opening sequence, McQueen resorts to repeating himself ad nauseam, his exacting direction emphasizing only his own skill, never the inner complexity of a character. I've not seen the director's Hunger, but I can only pray it does not browbeat its audience into an admiration of its visual prowess as Shame does.

The emphatic visuals push the film's wafer thin thematic content with equal assertion. Brandon's sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), shows up (to Brandon's extreme discomfort), eliciting strong but cheap hints of incestuous attraction. The siblings have more than one confrontation where one is nude, and the two clearly struggle with conflicted feelings for each other. To get out his feelings, Brandon tries to clean up his act, even attempting a date with a co-worker (Nicole Beharie), where the smooth bedder of women suddenly resembles an acne-scarred sophomore as he clumsily handles an actual date with conversation. And if you couldn't piece together that Brandon's sex addiction closes him off from real relationships, don't worry: you'll get plenty of subsequent scenes of punishing prostitute use to make sure we all haven't forgotten the effects of both normalcy and Sissy have on Brandon.

Nothing, though, can beat the arduous singing of "New York, New York," performed at a snail's crawl in full, clearly an attempt to pervert the musical advertisement of the city into something that reflects its seedy underbelly (certainly the line, "I wanna wake up in the city that doesn't sleep" has never been crooned with more irony). But this interminable scene merely sounds like someone messing with the turntable speed, and the embarrassing use of close-ups are as flat as the actual music. Self-indulgence is not a term I like to employ, given its overuse for practically any kind of artistic ambition, but rarely have I been so tempted to use it for this scene.

Throughout, Fassbender and Mulligan try their best to put some life into this drab series of surface textures. Mulligan plays Sissy with a bestial, unfocused longing that runs counter to her typical innocent waif image. Typically a great listener, Mulligan here portrays someone less capable of meaningful connection and engagement than even her solipsistic brother, for she lacks even the biological focus that diverts Brandon's hangups into an obsession. Sissy is a wretchedly underwritten character, but Mulligan makes up for this by making Sissy into a force of uninhibited, directionless dependence. So erratic and untamable is she that Fassbender's taut performance tears at the seams in dealing with her. As Brandon fights against his carnal desires and gets ever more entangled with Sissy and the vague but clearly unwelcome shared past she brings, Fassbender turns even more ghoulish. A scene late in the film of Brandon eerily, hungrily hitting on a taken woman casts him in sickly lighting that makes his erotic presence as repellent as it is magnetic. Fassbender plays the scene as if he has transcended any hint of pleasure in sex, a truly horrific snapshot of the addiction itself wearing Brandon as a skin.

Sadly, McQueen subsequently trades this genuine moment of horror for an extended series of climactic sorrows that neatly package shocks of various stripes drowned in Harry Escott's overwhelming score. So meaningless and emptily arty are these sequences that you could drop that black-and-white, slow-mo child death from the start of Antichrist in the middle of them and not raise a fuss. But for all the power of both Fassbender's and Mulligan's performances, McQueen's script has so routinely robbed them of any depth that his parade of woes never feels as harrowing as it thinks it is. And when the director concludes his film full-circle with a hint of ambiguity, he'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who, after all the talk of the nudity wears off, really cares what happens next.