The main character in Shame is named Brandon. He’s young, good-looking, rich, and lives in a plush Manhatten apartment. He's also a sex addict. At home he spends a lot of time looking at pornography. At work he ducks into the bathroom to masturbate. He doesn’t go on many dates but hires a lot of expensive call-girls. His life, in short, is full of meaningless sex for which we are given to believe he is ashamed.
So we are given to believe, but we don’t really know. The film, directed by artist Steve McQueen, is maddeningly vague. Brandon is played by Michael Fassbinder as a guy who spends a lot of time staring silently at things. He stares silently at married women on the subway. He stares silently as his bumbling boss fails to pick up women in a bar. I don’t know what he’s thinking during these moments and I feel like I should. Eventually, I got tired of guessing.
Michael Fassbinder is a talented actor. He’s the kind of sculpted, slow-burning method man you would want playing a sex addict. And there are moments, most of them near the end of the movie, when he finally lets the audience in on the self-hatred at the root of Brandon’s addiction. Those moments work. Fassbinder is also game for the movie’s many sex scenes, during which he does things many actors would be unwilling to do. His willingness to take chances is admirable, but without context those scenes don’t make much of an impact. Most of the time Brandon is an impassive mask, his eyes smoldering with… something… buried deep within. Good as the performance may be, it can’t overcome the strangely incomplete script.
The best example of that frustration is the character of Sissy. Played by Carey Mulligan, Sissy shows up out of the blue one night at Brandon’s apartment. Brandon is surprised to see her, and as the two argue the audience tries to figure out how they know each other. Is she his girlfriend, his wife, or something else? It turns out that she’s his emotionally needy sister, but we don’t learn that until well after she’s introduced. The movie is full of these little oversights, and most of them blow past directorial subtlety into the realm of the deliberately obtuse. The film refuses to give us a context in which we can sympathize with the characters, so we don’t.
What it gives us instead are a series of scenes and shots so self-indulgently artistic that they seem to exist merely to draw attention to themselves. A sample: Brandon and Sissy have a long argument while framed in profile. A black-and-white cartoon plays in the background. I don’t know why. Brandon goes on a nighttime run through the streets of Manhatten while the camera tracks his movement for at least forty seconds after the audience has lost interest. Easily the worst offender: Sissy, a nightclub performer, stares into the camera and sings “New York, New York” so slowly that the club could have closed and opened several times over before she finishes. Maybe if I knew who Sissy was, or who Brandon was, or what they had at stake, I would have been intrigued. As it stood I was just bored.
The most frustrating thing about Shame is that its biggest mistakes could have been avoided by giving us just a little more information. As I read it, Brandon and Sissy share in some secret pain from their past that has badly damaged them both. I don’t know what that pain is. I think I would have enjoyed the film more if I did. Things do pick up near the end, after Brandon has dragged himself through the seventh circle of sexual hell and we get a better idea of what he and Sissy mean to each other. But by then it’s far too little, far too late. Michael Fassbinder’s star is rising very fast and this film won’t slow it down, but it won’t be remembered as a milestone in his career either. I look forward to things better, brighter, and a bit more clear.
