As advertised, there’s lots of sex in visual-artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen’s Shame, but nobody in it gets screwed quite as deeply as the audience. Beneath all the fastidious camera compositions and classical music cues, this supposedly daring look at sex addiction is colossally shallow. And though the NC-17 rating might lead you to expect a libertine, open-minded quality, the movie is exactly as moralistic as its finger-wagging title suggests.
Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, a ridiculously fit and handsome Manhattanite who spends all his free time pursuing sex, either with ordinary women, high-priced call girls, or his own hand. And we’re not just talking evenings and weekends — we’re talking mornings before work, coffee breaks, and lunch, too. Brandon’s appetite for sex is endless, but his problem isn’t quantity, it’s quality. Brandon only wants sex without love, see, which makes him a very sad and spiritually empty man according to McQueen’s moral arithmetic. How do we know Brandon is empty? His far away eyes and deathly pallor are a good tip off, but McQueen draws endless visual parallels: Brandon’s apartment is so clean and orderly it looks virtually un-lived-in; his workplace (we’re never told what it is he does) is a cold, sterile glass tower populated by immaculately dressed yuppies; even the clubs he hangs out in are chic voids.
You can argue, as some reviewers have, that the film isn’t moralizing about promiscuity in that it’s expressly about sex as a disorder. But if we’re talking about a compulsion the protagonist can’t control, why the overwhelming tone of condemnation? Not only is the movie called Shame, for crying out loud, but the constant externalizing of Brandon’s spiritual desolation (the dead workplaces, the dead bars) clearly implies more than a critique of one disordered man — it’s a critique of the whole culture. So unless we’re all sex addicts, we’re back to the sex-without-love thing, and the implication that loveless sex is killing us. It’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar all over again.
Even if you accept McQueen’s schema, you still have to contend with his over-deliberate visual style. Take, for example, a shot where Brandon looks angry and pained during one of his many sexual encounters. In a hugely admiring review, Roger Ebert praises the shot as follows: “The character, Brandon, is having an orgasm. For McQueen, that could be the film’s master shot. There is no concern about the movement of Brandon’s lower body. No concern about his partner. The close-up limits our view to his suffering.” And that right there is my problem: McQueen limits our view to one puny interpretation instead of allowing us to make our own observations, and he does this throughout the entire film. It’s monotonous. The approach can work (arguably) if the interpretations are truly compelling, but McQueen’s are mind-numbing. How’s this for insight: in one scene, Brandon is unable to perform with a woman he actually likes, then in the very next scene — prepare for your mind to be blown — he performs perfectly with a prostitute he doesn’t give a damn about. It’s possible to get by with such facile observations when a scene is open-ended, if the observation is just one of many possible observations, but McQueen’s one-detail-at-a-time dramaturgy leaves nothing to respond to but his shallowness.
Fassbender, for his part, brings considerable magnetism to the role — and he looks great, of course — but he can’t make a character out of a cipher. By design, Brandon is an emptied out shell, and it would violate McQueen’s tidy moral universe if he displayed anything resembling enjoyment or a personality. He’s somewhat interesting in the early scenes, like the wordless sequence in which Brandon has eye-sex with a woman sitting opposite him on the subway. But as the film progresses and the character’s “shame” grows (as it must, apparently), Fassbender has little to do but look anguished and desolate. (And while we’re on the subject, has any actor ever managed to pull off a crying-during-sex scene? Eric Bana couldn’t do it at the end of Munich, and Fassbender can’t do it here when he has to sob while boffing two prostitutes.) It’s unfortunate that all of the awards talk surrounding Fassbender has focussed on this performance; he’s far more interesting as Carl Jung in David Cronenberg’s upcoming A Dangerous Method, or as Rochester in Cary Fukunaga’s recent Jane Eyre.
Shame‘s other major character is Brandon’s estranged sibling, Sissy, who shows up on his doorstep (or rather, in his shower) looking to crash with him for a few weeks. As played by Carey Mulligan, Sissy is the f’d-up yin to Brandon’s yang. While he’s cool and in control, she’s passionate and needy, and her presence in the apartment throws him into a tailspin. Like Fassbender, Mulligan gives the role her all, but the vaguely sketched character just doesn’t wash — she exists purely as a foil for Brandon, and she’s too over-the-top obnoxious. Among Sissy’s many unbelievably inconsiderate acts: bringing Brandon’s douchebag boss home from a bar, then forcing Brandon to listen from the couch while they do it in his bedroom. Later, when she says “I make you angry all the time and I don’t know why,” you want Brandon to whack her with one of his porno mags.
It doesn’t help that Mulligan is at the centre of the most unconvincing scene in the entire film. Shortly after we first meet her, Sissy invites Brandon to an ultra-swank nightclub to watch her cabaret act: a lugubriously slow, highly unaccomplished rendition of New York, New York. Yep, that’s right, the most overdone N.Y. tribute ever, and yet all the jaded Manhattanites in the club are so moved by it they stop their yakking and go completely silent, remaining that way throughout the entire song. (McQueen makes us sit through all of the verses, of course, his camera stuck in tight close-up on Sissy’s face.) Even more improbably, the emotionless Brandon is moved, too. We know this because a single tear rolls down his cheek as the song ends.
The only worthwhile element of the film is Nicole Beharie’s brief performance as Marianne, the woman Brandon fails to perform with. Beharie is relatively new to movies (she starred in the 2008 film American Violet, which I didn’t see), but already she pops off the screen. The minute she appears, you’re drawn to her, and not via any acting pyrotechnics, but because she seems so completely present, so blissfully good-humoured and sane. Suddenly, for the first time since the movie began, there’s a recognizable human onscreen, and you wish you could stay with her instead of the gloomy Brandon.
Most of the media coverage surrounding Shame has zoomed in on how “daring” it is, not just for its occasional bits of full-frontal, but for its “frankness” and “honesty.” To quote Ebert again, “Shame makes into a lie the universal assumption in movies that orgasms provide a pleasure to be pursued.” That’s funny, because in my moviegoing experience, this “universal assumption” is found mostly only in frat-boy comedies and the like, whereas unfulfilling sex is a total cliché in serious art-house films. In Europe, it’s almost a whole genre: the sadness-of-sex movie. Because what better way to avoid charges of prurience or frivolousness than to make sex look miserable? In any case, you know what would actually be daring? A movie about a highly sexual person who isn’t damaged, who actually takes pleasure from having many sex partners and isn’t made to look degenerate because of it.
Scott MacDonald is Toronto Standard’s Film Critic.
