It's a "Win Win"

I used to think I didn't like sports movies, because I have very little interest in any sports. However, a good film can take any subject and make it compelling, especially if it's coupled with some good human drama, strong characters, and a sense of humor about itself. So when I tell you that "Win Win" has a lot to do with high school wrestling, please keep in mind that the movie's not really about the wrestling. It serves as a focal point, but there's much more going on.

Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti) is a small town lawyer and family man, whose practice serves the elderly. Unable to make ends meet, he takes on the guardianship of one of his clients, Leo (Burt Young), who is going senile and can't live alone unassisted anymore. Leo wants to stay at home, and Mike convinces the judge that he can ensure that as his guardian, but then ships Leo off to a nearby nursing home to avoid doing the work. What Mike didn't count on was Leo's estranged grandson Kyle (Alex Shaffer) showing up on his grandfather's doorstep unannounced. Kyle ends up rooming in Mike's basement, despite the misgivings of his wife Jackie (Amy Ryan), while Mike tries to sort out the situation. It soon becomes clear that Kyle can't go home, but he might be a blessing in disguise. Mike and his friend Stephen (Jeffrey Tambor) coach the local high school wrestling team, and it turns out that Kyle is a natural.

Writer director Thomas McCarthy's oeuvre has become pretty clear. He makes small-scale comedy-dramas about unlikely individuals coming together and forming family groups, often through unusual hobbies or interests. In "The Station Agent," a trio of oddballs bond over trains. In "The Visitor," a professor and an illegal immigrant practice drumming together. McCarthy also had a writing credit on the PIXAR film "Up," about another odd-couple duo. So "Win Win," with its wayward characters figuring out where they belong, is familiar territory for him. However, you don't see many filmmakers these days who can handle these topics without making them overly sentimental or cloying or insincere. So I really appreciate it whenever one of his films shows up in the movie landscape, because it proves these stories can be modern and relevant and still entertaining. Like McCarthy's previous work, "Win Win" is a low-key charmer, but in less skilled hands, the material would not have come off nearly so well.

In spite of the eccentric characters, the emphasis on familial bonds, and a genial atmosphere, you couldn't really call "Win Win" a feel good film. Neither is it one of the recent batch of stereotypically cynical, self-aware indies about dysfunctional families. Instead, with its rough edges and big heart, McCarthy manages to strike a balance in tone somewhere between the two. Mike Flaherty is clearly a well-meaning good guy and he's easy to sympathize with, but the plot hinges on the fact that he's done something thoroughly rotten, and no plot twist is going to come along to save him from the fallout in the last act. Similarly, Kyle seems to be well on his way to redemption through the wrestling team, but the film never forgets that he's a seriously troubled kid, and his problems can't be solved easily, or all at once.

The performances are stellar across the board, and a lot of the film's resonance is due to the the fact that the characters come across as very genuine, multilayered people. The MVP award should go to Amy Ryan as the sharp, no-nonsense Jackie, who anchors the Flaherty family, and who everyone is accountable to in the end. Giamatti was never more likable, and Alex Shaffer, making his acting debut here, is quietly the most charismatic presence on the screen. Bobby Cannavale, Melanie Lynskey, and Margo Martindale all show up in smaller roles, all at the top of their game. And I doubt that anyone can resist the charms of Jeffrey Tambor playing a totally ineffectual wrestling coach.

If I have any criticism, it's that "Win Win" is easily Thomas McCarthy's most conventional film. It uses a lot of family drama and sports movie tropes, and doesn't really break any new dramatic ground. But on the other hand, McCarthy executes everything extraordinarily well and never lets the story become formulaic or predictable. "Win Win" is substantive without being heavy, uplifting without being twee. And best of all, it's genuinely funny. The humor is mostly situation, and doesn't rely on any overt jokes or gags, but I found myself smiling through the whole film.

I wish they made more of them like "Win Win."

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The Perils of Year-End Movie Montage Videos

Haven't done a post on fandom in a while have I? Let's fix that.

A trend I've noticed over the past few years is that many movie fans, who are also amateur editors, make film tribute videos at the end of each year, usually from footage collected from trailers. There's already one or two of these for the films of 2011 floating around on Youtube. These projects, like most fan-edited videos, are totally non-commercial and often can serve as good advertising, so the studios and artists who own the rights to the footage tend to leave them alone. One even gained some positive media attention a few years back.

I enjoy a good clip montage, and I really liked some of the early ones I saw, back in 2005 and 2006. These homemade tributes can be a great opportunities to do really creative, fun, different things with the familiar marketing clips we've been seeing all year. There aren't many venues outside of straitlaced award ceremonies that have the rights and access to edit together bits and pieces from so many different films, so it's the perfect kind of project for fans to tackle. There are still a few exceptional editors who I'll check in on every year, but lately my enthusiasm has been waning. I think this is one trend that is starting to wear out its welcome.

If you look at a bunch of these videos from different years, they start to look depressingly similar. Most end-of-the-year montage videos simply use too many clips, and a few editors even make it a point of pride to use a shot from every single film released in a particular year, no matter how obscure or how bad the film. And because everyone rushes to post these montage films online in December or January, there's no way that the editors have seen more than half of the films they're using footage from, so clips tend to be not particularly representative of the films. Rather they're the most showy bits, or shots that happen to fit the narrative they're trying to construct.

Using trailer footage also presents its own problems. As I've noted on this blog before, I think trailers have been steadily decreasing in quality over recent years, becoming more bland and generic. As a result, the footage they contain tends to be the most bland and generic parts of the films they're promoting. Think about the trailers for "Hugo" and "Planet of the Apes" compared to the finished films and you can see the problem. The best scenes from "Hugo" are all the spoilery ones from the end of the film, and there's no way anyone could get ahold of those clips by any legal means until "Hugo" arrives on DVD sometime in the spring. Some trailers, like the early ones for "The Muppets," are full of scenes that didn't even appear in the finished films. Could you spot Wanda Sykes anywhere but the trailer?

As a result, many of these videos are mind-numbing catalogs of endless mediocre films, and you get many of the same sort of sequences - compilations of the best actions scenes, shots of teary and romantic moments, and a lot of emphasis on familiar faces. Oh look, there's George Clooney, and Sandra Bullock, and Robert DeNiro looking a little grayer each year. It's often hard to tell which movie the stars appeared in, because you'll often only get a half-second head shot mixed in with a lot of others. In short, a lot of these montages end up looking like very, very long super-trailers for one big, expensive, film, full of hugging and explosions and every big movie star who made something that year.

Some of these projects are more artful and interesting than others, but it's hard to think of most year-end montages as real tribute pieces, as opposed to just massive editing exercises. I've seen a lot of good fan-made vidding projects out there using clips from films you can tell the editors really enjoyed and cared about. I don't get that from these latest "Best of" vids. The earliest year-end movie montage videos get kudos for being innovative, but the later ones haven't really built on them to do anything more distinctive or offer any real commentary. They just get longer, showier, and use newer music every year. You could easily churn out a montage video right now for the films from the first half of 2012, just from the trailers that have been released.

I'm not going to write off this whole category of vidding, but I will say that the stuff I like tends to be shorter and focus on fewer films, resulting in more personal, oddball looking videos. They don't get as many hits, and don't get their links passed around, but at least they feel like videos that were really made by fans.
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The Artistry of "The Artist"

All films are illusions. "The Artist" pulls off the wonderful trick of pretending that it's film from the late 1920s, the end of the silent era of Hollywood. It's in black in white, presented in the old 4:3 aspect ratio, and silent - only title cards fill in the most important bits of dialogue. But more than that, it recreates the look and the feel of those old Hollywood classics to an astonishing degree. Not only are there old cars in the streets and storefronts with vintage lettering on the windows, but the style of the acting and the way the shots are composed and edited all hearken back to that earlier era. However, "The Artist" is not a silent film in the strictest sense, because it doesn't play by the rules of one. It uses technology and techniques that were not available during the '20s, and contains other inconsistencies that I will not detail, because they are deliberate and should not be spoiled.

It is more accurate to say that "The Artist" is a film that uses all these old techniques to celebrate the lost art of silent filmmaking, and serve as an argument for its value. The film is very self-aware, highlighting many little storytelling tricks that the sound era did away with, showing how they're still as effective as ever. The plot is pure melodrama, and uniquely well suited to the whole conceit. We follow the career of George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a popular silent film star, who has a chance romantic encounter with a young would-be actress, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo). Then the sound era comes along and brings George to ruin, while Peppy becomes a headliner. However, Peppy still loves George, and fights to save him from obscurity and despair. Really, how much more meta can you get?

I'd never seen a silent film in a theater before, and watching "The Artist" on the big screen was extraordinary. You don't realize how much of a distraction the sound element is until it's removed, and you're left with only the pure image on the screen. There is a musical score, of course, which helps to heighten the emotional moments and play up the slapstick comedy, but a silent film is largely a visual experience. The performance of Jean Dujardin is a marvel, so genuine and effortless that you almost expect to find him sharing drinks with Chaplin or Fairbanks behind the scenes. Perhaps that's why next to him, Bérénice Bejo doesn't work quite as well. She delivers a terrific performance, but her looks just aren't cherubic enough for her to pass as a Hollywood ingenue.

And yet, it's hard to imagine that "The Artist" could have been made with either of these actors if it had been a sound film. Dujardin and Bejo, as well as the director, Michel Hazanavicius, are all French. And yet they've made a film that is pure Golden Age Hollywood, and probably wouldn't play as well in any other language other than English. And I think it helps that both of the leads are unfamiliar faces, to help sell the fiction that they're both old stars from some forgotten corner of film history. The more familiar actors who appear in the film, such as John Goodman, James Cromwell, and Missi Pyle, all fit the scenery, but their presence is slightly distracting. Then again, I doubt Hazanavicius wants his audience to entirely forget that they're watching a modern production.

It's a lot of fun for a film nerd to watch the director play with so many old visual tricks like collages and montages and vintage transitions, often playing homage to the films that originated them. At least two sequences directly reference "Citizen Kane." However, "The Artist" succeeds because the love story works, and it gets you to feel for the characters and root for them. It might take a while for a modern viewer, unfamiliar with the conventions of a silent film, to become immersed in the story. But once they do, I can't imagine that they wouldn't enjoy themselves. Sure, the melodrama is a little corny, and the pandering can get pretty shameless - George has an adorable Jack Russel terrier for a sidekick - but it's been a very long time since I've seen a film that held my attention so completely.

Yes, it's silent with intertitles. Yes, it's in black and white and stars actors few outside France have heard of. But that doesn't mean "The Artist" is stuffy or pretentious or just an academic exercise. Instead, it's a wonder. An imperfect throwback, perhaps, but an honest and honorable one. And in a year of nostalgic retreads and resurrections, "The Artist" is easily the most daring and successful of them all.
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Welcome to "The Future"

I don't like using "quirky" and "hispter" as descriptors, because they're rather vaguely defined terms, and are too often used to dismiss films about certain kinds of people and certain elements of modern day culture. In my experience, "hipster" is pretty much a catch-all for anyone who makes certain fashion choices or exudes even a whiff of irony in attitude or conversation. Take "The Future," for instance. It is a relentlessly whimsical, very odd, and somewhat self-indulgent indie film about a thirty-something couple whose relationship hits the rocks. Is it something that the hypothetical hipster population might enjoy? Sure. Does that mean it's a hipster film, as so many have decided to label it? I don't think so.

Sophie (Miranda July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) are a directionless pair of underachievers. She teaches tots at a dance studio and puts less-than-inspired videos of her own original routines on Youtube. He works from home in a low-skill tech support job. They decide to adopt a cat from the local shelter, Paw Paw, who is suffering from multiple ailments. The realization that committing to the cat means committing to a long-term responsibility they didn't really think through, suddenly puts their lives in perspective. Paw Paw has to stay at the shelter for an additional month, and in that time, Sophie decides that she'll turn her life around and Jason gamely follows her lead. Both quit their jobs and strike out in new directions, Sophie devoting more time to her dance videos and Jason getting a new gig selling trees door to door.

The world of "The Future" is a place of magic realism, where Jason can stop time at will, and has existential conversations with the moon. The entire film is narrated by Paw-Paw, represented by a pair of furry puppet forepaws, and a bizarre, scratchy, high-pitched voice. But despite all these playful, oddball storytelling devices, the humor is very black and the mood of the film mirrors the mood of Sophie, who is having some kind of midlife-crisis, or perhaps very late growing pains. She is bored, frustrated, unable to express herself, and all too aware that she's getting older and going nowhere. July's previous film, "You and Me and Everyone We Know," dealt with the formation of personal relationships in a similar fashion, but the characters in "The Future" are far more anxious, damaged, and adrift.

The approach reminds me a little of what Michel Gondry did with "A Science of Sleep," reflecting the creative inner world of his introvert hero with homemade effects, but July's work is more grounded in the real world, and her flights of fancy are far less fantastic. Sophie will put on silly-looking outfits to dance in, but we're supposed to find her sad and ridiculous when she does so. Quirkiness doesn't lead to adventure and enlightenment, as they might in a usual feel-good film, but often embarrassment or rejection. The film comes across as deeply personal and critical, and if Sophie is July's stand-in, it's telling that she represents herself as a little vacant, a little self-deluding, a little selfish, and little nuts. I found the character unlikeable and obtuse at first, but watching her deal with unexpected disappointment and failure won over my sympathies in the end.

If anything, "The Future" came across as an anti-hipster film, showing the limits of the kind of pseudo-bohemian, self-involved lifestyle that Sophie and Jason choose to live. There are moments that still celebrate the characters' individualism, however. The payoff to Jason's tree-selling career is a poignant moment. He genuinely believes in what he's doing, even if can't figure out how to be any kind of success at it. Our sympathies are meant to be with the couple from start to finish, but reality is unforgiving, and idealism is no panacea. It's not so much a message as an attitude, pointing July toward far more interesting emotional territory than what she explored in "You and Me."

Unfortunately, though I like individual segments and sequences of "The Future," it doesn't work as a whole. The conclusion is a muddle of ambiguous loose ends, several minor characters and storylines are abandoned, and some elements just seem to be thrown into the mix at random. Ideas are introduced but never fully explored, plots set up but never properly executed. Only one character achieves anything resembling definitive closure, while others arrive at arbitrary endpoints, almost by accident. The director is also a performance artist, and at times the film feels a lot like a bunch of different sketches slapped together. It's a very unsatisfying watch on a narrative level.

And yet, you have to admire Miranda July for making such an unconventional film, and accomplishing as much as she did with it. There are characters in the film worth meeting, and many creative visuals worth looking at and appreciating. I'd love to see July make more films, because her point of view is such a distinct and interesting one. But next time, if there is a next time, more story and less puppets please.
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The Embattled and the Embargoed

The latest awards season kerfuffle concerns New Yorker movie critic David Denby, who decided to publish his review of David Fincher's new version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" on December 5th, despite an embargo on reviews imposed by Sony Pictures, which insisted that no reviews be published before December 13th. The fact that the review is highly positive didn't keep "Dragon Tattoo" producer Scott Rudin from banning Denby from all future screenings of his films, or the studio from sending out dire warnings of doom and gloom to any film critic who would dare to follow Denby's lead. The critical community has erupted in debate, with some supporting Denby and decrying the current embargo system, while others are calling Denby's actions unprofessional and a breach of trust.

Now why are there embargoes on movie reviews? There are a lot of different answers to this. The most common one is that it's the price of early access. The studios provide early screenings to film reviewers, with the understanding that reviews will be published in a certain time frame, so they can be incorporated into release and marketing strategies. Positive reviews and critical support are especially important during the December and January awards push, pretty much the only time of year that the studios like to acknowledge the importance of the critical community at all. Smaller films like "Margaret" and "Tyrannosaur" have seen their profiles raised recently, thanks to support from individual critics, and "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" could use that kind of help to keep from being lost in the rush of late-December releases.

Critics benefit as well. Early screenings allow more time to write reviews, and a commonly cited reason for embargoes is that they are supposed to help to level the playing field so one critic or group of critics can't scoop everyone else. However, critics are an unpredictable lot and aren't in the habit of always writing the sort of reviews the marketing departments would like. So it's an odd sort of love-hate, symbiotic relationship that's developed between the critics and the studios over time. And as you might expect, sometimes things can get contentious.

The studios are under no obligation to provide early screenings, and have been steadily reducing them and adding more red tape and conditions to attend the remaining ones. Security restrictions have steadily been stepped up, with bans on everything from cel-phones to Twitter usage. Many studios don't screen films they know won't be well-received anymore, especially the horror and smaller genre pictures that good critical notices wouldn't help much anyway. For higher profile stinkers, where the lack of reviews might sound alarm bells, the embargo dates are often very close to the time of their actual release dates, to try and minimize the damage of bad reviews.

Generally the studios' tactics don't have much of an impact on publication dates for reviews anyway. Everyone tries to publish within a few days of film's release date, just because that's when the reviews will be the most relevant. Other reviewers have broken embargoes before, though usually only by a day or two, and haven't run into this kind of opposition. The New Yorker review presents a special case, both because Denby is very high profile in the New York critical community and because he's breaking the embargo date by a full week.

So why did David Denby publish so far in advance? "Dragon Tattoo" won't be released until December 21st. Well, according to Denby, it came down to publication constraints. The New Yorker magazine only devotes limited pages to film reviews, and in a crowded December, there were too many films and not enough space to review them. Denby published his "Dragon Tattoo" review alongside one for "The Adventures of Tintin," which will also open December 21st, because he wanted to save more room for other pictures. Better a slightly premature review in the New Yorker than none at all, right?

Well, Sony and Rudin, and a lot of Denby's fellow critics didn't see it that way. You can read some of the leaked E-mails between Denby and Rudin on Indiewire, over here. Anyway, reactions are coming in from all sides, fast and furious. Other critics who haven't had the chance to see the film yet feel they've been scooped. Some claim Denby's just doing this to drum up publicity. Some claim that Rudin is overreacting, and that he's trying to drum up publicity. Nobody seems to think this will hurt the film, but everyone is sure that somebody is at fault.

I don't know whose side I'm on. Denby breaking the embargo was a clear breach of decorum and established protocol. On the other hand, he lays out some pretty compelling reasons for doing so, and it's hard to see how a very positive review could possibly hurt "The Dragon Tattoo" simply by showing up online a few days early. Rudin being so hyperbolic makes him look bad, but he's not just worried about this film, but the ones in the future that might be seriously harmed if this instance of embargo-breaking sets protocol. Then again, does the studio-controlled system of embargoes make sense anymore, when all but a few films are "critic proof," and the ones that are actually courted for critical support all get squeezed into the last six weeks of the year?

I just don't know. But it sure is fun reading the debate. Stay tuned.
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An Appreciation of Peter Greenaway

I was going to write up one of my usual "favorite film by so-and-so" posts for Peter Greenaway, but this director presents a special case. I certainly have a favorite film of his, which is "A Zed and Two Noughts," sometimes shortened to "Z00," but there are still several of his major features I haven't been able to track down yet - "The Pillow Book" and "The Draughtsman's Contract" for instance - and I'm just busting to write about the ones that I have seen already, while my memory of them is still fresh. And quite honestly his movies share so many themes and ideas, they often feel like variations of each other, so it feels right to talk about them in aggregate.

You often hear about director's visuals being influenced by classical painting, but Peter Greenaway is the only director I've come across whose visuals literally look like paintings from start to finish. He creates spectacular, detail-rich environments with very formal blocking and composition of elements, framed in such a way as to emphasize their relationships to each other. His shots are often static, or limited to long pans and zooms, emphasizing design over motion. It's no surprise that he began as a painter himself, and that he's made several films about artists and architects, including Étienne-Louis Boullée, Hendrik Goltzius, and Rembrandt van Rijn.

But the biggest recurring theme in his movies is obsession. Obession with death, with sex, with order, and with conspiracy. "A Zed and Two Noughts" is about twin zookeepers who make a study of death and decay, after a tragic car accident claims both of their wives. The hero of "The Belly of an Architect" is consumed by recurring stomach pains, sexual infidelities, and art history. "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" is all about oversized appetites, for food, for power, and for revenge. Greenaway made two films, a dramatization and a documentary, about the Rembrandt painting "Nightwatching," which may be a secret accusation of murder by the painter. All of these obsessions inevitably lead to downfall and often death.

And Greenaway is certainly an obsessive himself, from the staggering level of work he puts into these films, and the myriad ways he explores every new subject. Take "Drowning By Numbers," for instance, where a trio of women, all named Cissie Colpitts, drown their husbands one after the other. Scenes and actions all recur in threes, like verses in a poem. A major player in the plot is the local coroner, a man who loves archaic counting games with elaborate rules. To top it all off, the numbers 1 to 100 appear in the film, in order, forming a long countdown to the film's finale. Most can be found in the visuals, some are spoken aloud, some are almost impossible to find, and several appear in groups of three at a time. Coming out of the theater, I wonder if some audiences found themselves subconsciously counting the cars in the parking lot.

Greenaway had two famous collaborators on his most memorable films who must be mentioned. The first was cinematographer Sacha Vierny, who worked on all of Greenaway's films up until his death in 2001. Vierny also did many of Alan Resnais's films, including the maddening "Last Year at Marienbad." The other was composer Michael Nyman, who is probably best known for "The Piano," and is terribly good at writing music that is perfect for going insane to. Greenaway and Nyman did eleven films together, and then had a falling out in the early 90s. Both men had a lot to do with creating the particular tone of Greenaway's films, this methodical, orderly, slightly sinister, slightly mechanical feel. Not only were you sure the hero would die, but come to his doom in exactly the right way, at exactly the right time, in the perfect light for the audience's inspection.

As I watched more and more Greenaway films, I was a little stunned that I'd never heard of him earlier, because Greenaway's favored subject matter, black humor, use of irony, and classical bent are all right up my alley. The more I think about it though, the more his obscurity becomes understandable. The pacing of these films is often very slow and deliberate. Sex and nudity are frankly portrayed, though never in a particularly prurient fashion. His stories are wildly strange and fascinating, but not always in a way that's easily approachable. Characters are very flat, and often feel more like props than human beings. And of course, not everyone enjoys witnessing other people's obsessions and descents into madness. Frankly, I think you may have to be a little nuts, or at least susceptible to going nuts, in order to fully enjoy some of his films.

On the other hand, many of Greenaway's fans have complained, and I fully agree with them, that his films are just too damn hard to find. "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" is out of print on DVD, but unexpectedly popped up on Netflix. It doesn't look like "Prospero's Books" was ever released in Region 1 format at all. Ditto "Drowning by Numbers," which I've found impossible to get ahold of any decent, non-fuzzy print of.

I don't regret going to the trouble to find and watch these films though, because they're that good. I'd put Peter Greenaway up there in the pantheon of the great directors with Kubrick and Kurosawa in a second, and I expect he's going to endure for a lot longer than some of the big name, big-deal filmmakers of the present day.

Once I get through a few more titles, I expect I'll come back to do a proper "Favorites" post. I've been typing for hours and I still have too much to say.
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Meet "Martha Marcy May Marlene"

In the opening scenes of "Martha Marcy May Marlene," we watch idyllic scenes of life on a small commune in the Catskills, and it is slowly revealed that these are members of a cult. Still, nothing stands out as particularly unsettling until one of the young women, called Marcy May (Elizabeth Olsen), walks off into the woods and makes a narrow escape. At a nearby town, she calls her older sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), her only family. We learn Marcy May's real name is Martha, and she hasn't had contact with Lucy in two years, since they had some kind of falling out.

The damage that the cult and its charismatic leader, Patrick (John Hawkes), have done to to Martha isn't immediately apparent. And though Lucy and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) are wealthy and well-meaning, they are not emotionally prepared to help Martha through the transition. After their reunion, Lucy takes Martha home to the picturesque vacation home she and Ted are occupying in Connecticut, where Martha's mind slowly begins to unwind. She clashes with Lucy and becomes increasingly plagued by bad memories and paranoia. Flashbacks reveal how she became involved with Patrick and the cult, as she struggles to escape their continued influence in the present.

It's been a good year for cults on film, or a bad one depending on how you look at it. "Martha Marcy May Marlene" isn't really a film about a cult though. It's about the type of person that makes it possible for cults to exist, who are the most susceptible to their pull, and who are unable to break away unscathed. And I expect that studying them is just as helpful as studying the David Koreshes of the world if you want to get to the heart of the matter. Martha is such a character, easily one of the most complex and interesting portrayals of a cult member to ever appear onscreen.

And "Martha Marcy" wouldn't work if the performance of Elizabeth Olsen as Martha weren't as strong as it is. I think she's been a little oversold as the newest Hollywood debutante, but she's certainly got the chops to carry the film. Martha puts on a tough, stubborn exterior, but her mental state is far more fragile. While Olsen may not be as nuanced as some of her peers, she's very good at subtly conveying a gamut of emotions while hardly changing her expression. Because Martha is so evasive, and has been so deeply repressed, much of the conflict involving the character is going on internally. Olsen is sometimes too impenetrable, but she always retains an aura of great vulnerability and loss.

And it's that loss that makes the film so distinctive. Writer/director Sean Durkin avoids sensationalizing the cult and its members, mostly by keeping the film very tightly focused on Martha's personal experiences. While Martha's departure from the cult removes her from unwanted influences, the film shows that it also removes the major stabilizing, normalizing force in her life, and this has profound consequences that she cannot foresee. There are no easy answers provided, and no labels affixed to Martha's condition. Rather, themes are handled deftly, with sensitivity and insight.

Martha's feelings of persecution and paranoia, on the other hand, I have more trouble with. The filmmakers take all that good character drama, and push it almost to the brink of a genre thriller, but not quite. Martha's mental deterioration, coupled with the ambiguity of whether we're examining her memories, or if she's seeing things that aren't really there in the present, drives the film's second half. These elements are well executed and enjoyable, but I don't think "Martha Marcy" needed so much heavy-handed psychological metaphor. The ending especially, has some horror overtones that go a little too far.

There is an awful lot to like about the film though. Other members of the cast that should be singled out for attention include John Hawkes as Patrick, who is a magnetic charmer one minute and terrifying monster the next. I haven't liked Sarah Paulson in many of her other roles, but she's perfectly cast as Lucy, and she quickly made me sympathetic to a pretty unlikeable character. Dirkin's direction is moody and sharp, and he has a good eye for composing mundane, and yet terribly unsettling images. He already understands the value of not showing too much. And the music is just enough to add to the picture without becoming obtrusive. Hawkes' performance of "Marcy's Song" is a highlight.

So a few minor issues aside, "Martha Marcy" is definitely worth a watch. And keep an eye out for Elizabeth Olsen in the future, though from the buzz around her, I doubt you'll need to look very hard.
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