"Shame" (2011)

Is Steve Rodney McQueen’s “Shame” a good film? The answer to that question is more difficult than one might think, as it has a lot of elements in its favour. Chief among these are Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, who both deliver flawlessly heartbreaking performances, the former as self-loathing sex-addicted yuppie Brandon and the latter as his alcoholic self-harming sister Sissy. As he previously did in “Hunger”, McQueen displays an indisputable talent in bringing out the best in his actors, and the film is at its best in those long, uninterrupted and barely-moving shots where he simply lets his actors act and leaves their performances to speak for themselves. Unfortunately, another tendency that occasionally hindered “Hunger” comes back with a vengeance and severely damages this film’s efficiency: Heavy-handed moralizing.

In “Hunger”, it took the form of repeated high-angle shots of remorseful prison guard Raymond Lohan washing his bloody-knuckled hands and a close-up of a snowflake melting on those knuckles. In “Shame”, the moralizing is more prevalent and not restricted to particular shots. It manifests itself more through the way Harry Escott’s overly solemn score underlines every scene of Brandon wandering New York’s unsympathetic streets looking to satisfy a craving he loathes. Over and over, the idea is hammered in with little subtlety: Brandon is ashamed, he feels dirty, he’s self-destructive, he hates sex as much as he needs it, and the audience has to feel his pain and sympathize with him. Not only is such an approach self-defeating, it is completely unnecessary when Michael Fassbender is doing such a superb job of conveying all of this by himself, and is supported so admirably by his partners.

Aside from Carey Mulligan, whose almost unbearable emotional nudity constitutes the film’s very heart as well as its best performance, Nicole Beharie is the most notable of those partners. She plays Marianne, a coworker of Brandon whom he fantasizes about and who successfully talks him into a date. In one of the film’s most successful long takes, Marianne quizzes Brandon about his background and past relationships. Brandon is still shy and protected by emotional barriers but he lets his guard down enough to risk shocking her by admitting that he doesn’t believe in long-term relationships, and that his longest relationship lasted four months. They interact with each other in a way that makes the scene appear largely improvised, with just enough honesty behind Brandon’s fences to suggest that the seeds of a real emotional connection may have been planted. Unfortunately for Marianne, Brandon sabotages these seeds the very next day by sneaking her out of work to have sex in the Standard Hotel only to find that he cannot maintain an erection with a woman he cares about. Unfortunately for the viewer, McQueen sabotages his scene by filming it in a single shot that, while clever in its mirroring of the earlier long shots depicting the couple’s non-sexual interactions, is too distant and obvious for the scene’s tonal shift from awkward tenderness to mortifying self-implosion to really sink in.

Much has been made of the film’s sexual content, even though it is really no more explicit than your average HBO show. The film is no more about sex than Brandon’s addiction is. It is about loneliness and the inability for these two characters to connect to anyone else but each other. A traumatic childhood is hinted at through dialogue – “We’re not bad people” Sissy explains, “we just come from a bad place” – which has led many to speculate they were sexually abused as children and that each one’s self-abuse is a consequence of this. This kind of subtlety is something the film should have displayed more, by allowing the characters to truly get under the audience’s skin and let their actions and words speak for themselves, rather than try and drive the point home with sad music and an abundance of yellow lighting.

So, returning to the question that opened this review, is Steve Rodney McQueen’s “Shame” a good film? The ideal answer would be “yes”. The honest answer is “almost”. It joins the ranks of other noble failures such as “Dancer In The Dark”, “Days Of Heaven” and “Network”. Like them, it had all the ingredients necessary for greatness but was ultimately undone by the excessive abundance of one of them.