'Shame' is an unflinching look at the dark side of human nature

Shame was not playing in my hometown. I had to drive four hours north to San Antonio on the pretense of celebrating the birthday of one of my brothers to see it, stuck in a tiny theatre attached to a decaying mall on the town’s northwest center.

This was not the first time that I have sojourned in the name of great cinema – if a certain actor or director is a part of the film, I will make the effort to see it on the big screen rather than wait for the DVD release. Great films need to be experienced on large scales; my television at home just doesn’t feel right when scenes display a sun-parched desert, or a tiny raft amidst a vast ocean, or a lone stranger in a strange city….or Michael Fassbender as a sex addict.

2011 was a banner year for Fassbender: Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, A Dangerous Method, and Shame earned him strong critical praise and rising commercial appeal for playing some famous personages from literature (Edward Rochester, Magneto) and psychiatry (Carl Jung) while risking everything on his last entry of the year.

Shame is Fassbender’s movie: he is in practically every scene and his clothing is often optional. Few actors can calmly walk in and out of a room TWICE wearing nothing put a pained expression and then relieve themselves in the restroom on queue (a scene Fassbender claimed was real).

Shame is Fassbender’s second collaboration with British director Steve McQueen after 2008’s excellent Hunger, in which he dropped serious weight off his already thin frame to brilliantly portray Irish hunger-striker Bobby Sands.

Hunger did not shy away from examining what happens to the human body when taken to extremes, and Shame continues McQueen’s gritty, physical style.

McQueen reminds me of Canadian director David Cronenberg in the way he does not shy away from, but rather involves blood and guts and rage and passion as part of his artistic palette, on the same measure as his medium shots of the character’s lithe physical form or the greys, blues, and purples of his scenes’ cityscapes. Shame’s outdoor shots of New York City even reminded me of the London outdoors of Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises: each late afternoon and night looks cold, wet, and menacing.

Fassbender plays Brandon Sullivan, a smartly dressed, lean, athletic, square-jawed yuppie (if that social description even exists in 2011) who works at an ambiguous tech firm where the décor is very sparse, the windows are very large, and most of the details are on the computer screens.

He might be in mergers and acquisitions (or as Patrick Bateman described them, “murders and executions”), a trends analyst, or an image consultant – any of those postmodern titles ascribed to the rapaciously bright career climbers of the technological age. His apartment is equal in design and ambience – not a big place, but the metal and chrome furniture and white, grey, and blue color scheme make it feel at once coolly hip and overly clean. All the DVDs are lined up next to the vintage record player emitting a classical aria into the sparse room. No pictures of family, no plant life, and though you never peer into Brandon’s fridge, I’m sure it only has juice and batteries. His nightly routine consists of eating from Chinese takeout cartons, flipping open his laptop, and watching pornography (only heard, not seen) while compulsively shaking his leg.

He could have easily been checking email and awaiting an important memo from his boss; instead, he seems to be anxiously searching for his next fix – something which can focus his attention and bring him the pleasurable feelings that inevitably come with a price (literally and figuratively). He is a sex addict with women as his drug of choice, and they are everywhere: on the street, in bars and clubs, at work, in the yellow pages.

Even on the subway, he encounters a pretty young woman across the train who first responds to his stare with shy flirtation, then blushing awareness of his attention, then uncomfortable fidgeting at his persistence, then anxious evasion as he stealthily moves closer and attempts to follow her out of the tunnel.

Brandon thinks he has control over his world, as any addict does: he can quit anytime he wants. He has cocooned himself inside this little world where he can nurture the addiction that at once feeds and repulses him. It is this entrenchment that causes him to appear shocked when he arrives at work one day to find his desk computer routed to the IT department because of an apparent virus (it seemingly never occurred to him that downloading porn at work might trigger security protocols).

It is equally disheveling when he arrives home to find his apartment overtaken by the poster child for hot messes, his jazz-singer sister, Sissy (again, never occurring to him that repeatedly ignoring phone calls from her might trigger a surprise visit). Sissy, played by an exquisite Carey Mulligan, is all peroxide blonde and breathy, childlike whispers.

She probably knew from a young age how to lure older men to do things for her by playing the vulnerable coquette. In a way, she reminded me of Marilyn Monroe in her last, unfinished film, Something’s Got To Give, shot right before her death. Her impossibly blonde curls were starting to look fried, the bright big eyes becoming a bit jaded, and her emotional and mental fragility outweighed any sex appeal. Sissy is Monroe at the end of her rope, scorning the sexual image yet unable to break out of the mould that had allowed her to interact with others.

The addict’s world is one of a false sense of control and security, and Brandon’s house of cards is starting to tremble. Sissy is a virus in his life that infects how he handles work, how he deals with coworkers, and how he accesses sex, his drug of choice.

Fassbender masterfully displays Brandon’s slow unraveling as one pivotal scene shows him moved to tears at Sissy’s amazing, heartbreaking performance of “New York, New York” in a jazz club (director McQueen rarely veers from close-up shots of Mulligan’s cherubic, haunted face unless to show Fassbender’s careworn, aching eyes and tightly pressed lips as he fights the tears). The following scene, after Sissy picks up his boss later that night, has him crouch in the corner of his living room in cringing disgust at the sounds of his sister and his boss in the apartment’s only bedroom.

Sissy has now invaded every part of his life, from having sex in his bed to finding a naked woman awaiting him in the online chat room of his home computer. Brandon starts to lash out at his sister, first verbally and then physically. As Sissy exposes more and more of his addiction, he begins to see her as the manifestation of his impulses, and his revulsion at himself is directed towards her.

Brandon has deliberately built a wall around himself in which he avoids love and relationships, and yet he makes attempts to try and extricate himself of this self-made prison. He tries to quit cold-turkey after Sissy accuses him of being hypocritical in his judgment of her, throwing away huge piles of tapes, DVDs, magazines, pictures, and even his personal laptop into black garbage bags then tossed next to the street.

He tries to connect with an attractive coworker who obviously likes him, even getting her to a hotel room, but in one of the film’s hardest scenes to watch, he cannot bring himself to reciprocate the emotions that she is giving to him. She wants to kiss his face and look at him in the eyes – he stares at her wondrously.

He’s not used to this, and it is throwing him off kilter. He is not in control, and his performance (usually that of a well-oiled machine) sputters and dies. He retreats to a corner of the room in shame and confusion, unable to look at the woman who wants to console him. He doesn’t even walk her out to the lobby.

After that, he resumes his downward spiral with an alarming momentum, calling up a prostitute without leaving the same hotel room, hitting on a brute’s girlfriend at a seedy downtown bar, getting jumped by said brute, staggering to a club, being denied entrance, and finally out of pure desperation, relenting to patronage within the filthy recesses of a cavernous gay brothel. No words are exchanged in this humiliating transaction and there is no need – the contorted look on Fassbender’s face during the act is silently screaming out in indignation.

Throughout all this, Sissy is repeatedly trying to reach her brother on his cell phone. She desperately needs him, this is true, but he needs her as well. “We’re not bad people; we just come from a bad place” she pleads with him in her little-girl voice over the phone. She knows what he is up to, but he doesn’t return the calls. A

s his shame becomes rage, he has one last encounter with prostitutes (who don’t seem surprised when he appears at their door, dirty, bruised, and cut), in a scene where composer Harry Escott’s mournfully beautiful score counters the vulgar acts into which Brandon throws himself with reckless abandon, his tortured features less pleasured than ravaged. This is the rock bottom at which he finds himself now.

When he can’t get a hold of Sissy on his way back home and races anxiously to his apartment, the audience knows what he is going to find. It was a miracle that he got to her in time – the amount of blood surrounding her body on the grey-blue tiles of the bathroom floor convinced me she had exsanguinated.

But Sissy does make it, and Brandon lays his head next to hers on the pillow in the hospital room in the same dazed stupor as his sister: two siblings exhausted by the paths of their lives. Will Brandon finally turn his life around? Will Sissy?

The movie doesn’t answer this. The ending scene finds Brandon on the subway again, looking at an attractive married woman. The audience is left wondering if he can ever overcome his addiction. One hopes that he and Sissy will lean on each other, but that is expecting a lot from two emotionally fragile people. We have to believe that he can claw his way out of the pit in which he has entrenched himself.

The ambiguity of the man perched on a physical, emotional, and spiritual cliff is what makes McQueen’s film an excruciating yet captivating film.