Shame

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.

Drive

Drive is confused.  Nevertheless, it works on the surface and provides an engrossing hour and a half at the movies.

Drive’s core story purports to be the parable of the turtle and the scorpion.  You know the story: Scorpion asks Turtle for a ride across the river.  Turtle says, “No.  When we’re halfway across, you’ll sting me.”  Scorpion replies, “Think about it: if I sting you, we both die.  What would be the point of that?”  Turtle sees Scorpion’s logic and tell him to climb aboard.  Halfway across the river, Scorpion stings Turtle.  As they’re both drowning, Turtle says, “Why did you sting me?”  Scorpion replies, “You knew what I was when you agreed to carry me.”

In the film, Ryan Gosling’s driver wears a satin jacket with a scorpion embroidered on the back.  Toward the end of the narrative, he tells one of his adversaries, “If you carry a scorpion, you’re going to get stung” (or something to that effect).  Problem is, his adversaries don’t even know who he is until it’s too late.  The parable doesn’t hold, because Drive’s real point is “don’t mess with scorpions.”

Ok, so something got lost between drafts.  Nevertheless, Drive succeeds because it features an interesting lead, supporting characters with surprising subtlety, and a sufficiently complex plot to keep us on our toes until the closing credits.

Ryan Gosling plays Driver, a character similar to Alain Delon’s Jef Costello in Le Samourai and George Clooney’s Jack in The American.  An introvert with a gift and a passion for his work, he says little and controls his face and body language.  This makes him a cool, yet blank, slate: a projection screen for the aspirations and/or desires of the audience.  When he notices the disturbingly skinny Carey Mulligan, he toys with making the single greatest mistake a character like him can make: he connects.  You probably think you know where this is going, and you may well be right.  However, it still works because Mulligan’s character isn’t just another damsel to distress.  She’s a fully realized human being, perhaps more fully realized than our protagonist; and so are the people to whom she’s connected, and to whom they’re connected.  Even the villains fascinate us with their back stories and their agendas, a fascination facilitated by remarkably unique, yet effective, casting.

Soon enough, these characters find themselves embroiled in a well-executed story of trust, doubt, and revelation that engages our imagination and helps us forget that we’ve seen this protagonist’s character arc before and we know how it’s going to end. 

The result? Though it’s little mixed up on its central parable, Drive delivers a tale well told in an immersive world.  You could do much, much worse.

Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go is basically Parts: The Clonus Horror, but for chicks.  Is has the same premise as Parts, but it goes for melancholy romance instead of horror thriller.

It would have been better as a horror thriller.

Never Let Me Go, which is about three clones and their love triangle, is supposed to make us cry as they try to find happiness in the face of mortality.  It made me think about how much better it would have been if they’d set out to confront an unnaturally long-lived Peter Graves.  This is a drab, depressing, ultimately dull film, and I wish I had a clone so it could have sat through it instead of me.

Bummer.