Shame brings to
mind Leaving Las Vegas. They’re both about addiction, and neither are
about redemption. They’re both about
addicts who have lost all inhibition, all control over their addictions. They’re about people who’ve burrowed into
their addictions, feeding their needs far past satiety, past loathing. They wrap themselves in shame. They are their addictions.
With Nicolas Cage in Leaving
Las Vegas, it’s alcohol. With Michel
Fassbender in Shame, it’s
orgasm. And while these addictions are
terrible and destructive, they aren’t, ipso
facto, particularly compelling.
Humanity is compelling. In Leaving Las Vegas, humanity comes in the
guise of Elisabeth Shue as a prostitute who recognizes the man inside the
addiction. In Shame, it’s Carey Mulligan as a sister so damaged she forces the
man to look beyond his.
Cage, of course, won an Academy Award for Leaving Las Vegas. Fassbender deserved one for Shame, delivering a performance
breathtaking in its fearlessness and competence. His character begins the film a slave to his
compulsions, yet he seems to have found some kind of a workable life
balance. When Mulligan’s character
enters the scene, however, he’s forced to see himself. His dawning realization, his reaction to that
realization, and his subsequent evolution (or lack thereof) is absolutely
magnificent to behold.
My tastes in film run toward the upbeat low- to middlebrow. A movie like Shame, like Leaving Las Vegas,
generally isn’t my thing. But sometimes,
a film is so good, so well made, so compelling, that it defies those tastes and
becomes something I recommend to all my friends. Leaving
Las Vegas is such a film. So is Shame.
