Review: "Shame" Could Use a Money Shot

Michael Fassbender

Writer/director Steve McQueen's Shame begins with a shot of currently omnipresent leading man Michael Fassbender lying naked in bed, staring blankly into the camera. It's a posture, an expression, and a degree of dressedness that we will come to get quite comfortable with over the next two hours - because while it bares more skin than your average adult drama, the film is extremely calculated when it comes to emotional engagement. With its unsexy sex and transactional couplings, the film is much like one of its own nameless prostitutes - asking us to invest while offering only a calculated fantasy in return.

Like the buzzed-about graphic sex scenes it contains, Shame doesn't quite make it to the money shot.

Fassbender plays Brandon, a well-off, exceedingly handsome executive living one of those blandly perfect New York City lives that probably don't exist outside of movies trying to make a point about how crushingly empty successful urbanites actually are. Naturally, Brandon's chrome-glass-and-Egyptian-cotton life has a dark underbelly: He's a sex addict who takes multiple masturbation breaks a day, regularly engages the services of prostitutes, and crushes his office hard drive under mountains of downloaded hardcore porn.

Carey Mulligan

Still, at first glance things don't seem that bad. I mean, if I looked like Michael Fassbender I'd probably take myself for as many test drives as possible - wouldn't you? But when Brandon's estranged sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) drops in from out of town to crash, Brandon's carefully controlled routine slips and his behavior goes off the tracks. Thanks to the fact that he is rich and lives in New York City (Where Life is Cheap), Brandon has a buffet of anonymous encounters and chemical propellants at his immediate disposal, which he goes about exhausting with Dionysian abandon. It's kind of like American Psycho without the body count. (Or the sense of humor.)

The question here seems to be exactly what the root of Brandon's problem is, and why his meticulously-crafted routine of self-satisfaction is thrown into such disarray by the arrival of his sister. But the question itself is only tentatively asked - the bulk of the film is spent watching a dead-eyed Fassbender thrust and grunt his way between subway rides, board meetings and mind-numbingly dull conversations with his boss and seemingly only friend (James Badge Dale). The rest is up to us to interpret from a series of blank stares, fits of rage and Skinemax-ready bootycalls.

James Badge Dale

While your own feelings about Brandon's condition and how much sympathy it should elicit may vary widely from those of the person sitting next to you (contemporary urban ambiguity is the real aphrodisiac here, after all), Fassbender does an impressive job showing very little and very much at the same time. His Brandon is a tightly-wound, deeply troubled man who seems about to spring not just out of his clothes but out of his very skin.

Wonderfully, terribly awkward when Brandon actually tentatively attempts a "normal" courtship with a new co-worker (the fantastic Nicole Beharie), Fassbender masterfully shows the cracks in his character's shell without revealing what's underneath. To see such obvious brokenness combined with such an impressive physical specimen is a troubling, even scary thing - particularly when he is placed in close quarters with such a fragile creature as Sissy.