Martha Marcy May Marlene

NOTE:  This contains a spoiler.  The spoiler won’t be about the story, but about how the story is told.  If you read this, you won't learn less about the plot than you would in most professional reviews.  However, you’ll learn about an element of the film’s structure that I don’t think the filmmakers want you to know up front.


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"Tell me a story."  It’s what we want films to do.  Take us away, capture our imagination, perhaps expand our mind.  Begin it.  Develop it.  Let it reach its climax.  Craft a satisfying denoument.  This is how stories go.  This is how we’re wired to hear them.  This is what we want.


Martha Marcy May Marlene begins with a young woman’s escape from a back-to-the-land cult.  It’s the climax of a story that began when she joined, one we get in flashback as we watch the story of her reintegration unfold.  That story begins when Marcy moves in to her sister’s place.  It develops.  It reaches an unsatisfying climax.  Then, just when we think we're in the denoument, it indicates a fuller, better climax is still on the way.  Next - whammo!  Black screen.  Roll credits.  What the heck?


So Martha Marcy May Marlene only tells us part of a story.  I'm sure the filmmakers had their reasons.  "Ambiguity is good."  "People will have something to discuss after they leave the theater."  "We like screwing with our audience."  I'm not buying it.  In the words of noted sage Sammy Hagar:


C'mon, baby.  Finish what you started.
I'm incomplete!

Adam

In Adam, a boy meets a girl.  He loses her.  Maybe he gets her back.  We’ve seen this before.  But this film has an angle.

Adam has Asperger’s syndrome.  Asperger’s is a kind of high-level autism that manifests itself, among other ways, through an inability to intuit the emotions of others.  In fact, the world of social interaction, all those little gestures and words that most people intuitively understand and navigate, mystifies Asperger’s people.  Asperger’s people tend to perseverate on a subject, boring deeply into an area of interest and thinking and talking about it to the exclusion of nearly all else, which can bore the hell out of those without it – and Asperger’s people can’t read the signs of boredom.  Asperger’s people generally don’t lie; they eschew nuance; and there’s something about the unique way their brains are wired that often leads to genius.  Many think Mozart, as well as Edison and Einstein and Doc Brown, had Asperger’s.  My ten-year-old son has Asperger’s. 

Adam’s eponymous protagonist has a more serious case of the syndrome than my son.  Where my son comes across as a particularly bright, though socially awkward and verbose, kid; Adam (as assayed by English actor Hugh Dancy) experiences Asperger’s as a crippling affliction that limits his ability to work, to make friends, to deal with any kind change to his routine and sense of order.  In Dancy’s performance, I saw a magnified version of my son: his perseverations, his struggles with behaviors like smiling and making eye contact, his inability to glide along when the conversation turns to topics he finds uninteresting.

I’m telling you all this to explain why I cannot evaluate Adam as a work of narrative cinema.  The subject matter’s too close to my heart.  The star’s performance evoked too much of my son.  See, I want my boy to find love, to find his place in the world, and I transferred that desire to Adam’s title character.  I was so completely on this guy’s side from nearly the first frame, so happy to see him develop, so heartbroken when he encountered obstacles, so in the moment, that I can only tell you that Dancy nails Asperger’s.  I’m going to recommend this film to my wife, and I’ll recommend it to you if you know someone with Asperger’s (or if you have it, yourself).  Adam may very well be a pedestrian romantic film about an Asperger’s guy and a “normal” girl trying to make a relationship work.  But if the angle speaks to you, you’ll love it.

I did.