In "Shame," Steve McQueen's mournful portrait of an addict hitting rock bottom, Michael Fassbender plays a man committing suicide by accumulation, seeking self-annihilation through the compulsive pursuit of sex. But what movies so often relegate to the margins of pornography here is radically redefined, stripped of its erotic charge and depicted as a numbing erasure of life and emotion.
If that makes "Shame" (opening today at the Crest) sound joyless, that's because it is. In fact, fans of Fassbender's performances in this year's "Jane Eyre" and "X-Men: First Class" should know that, although we see the handsome Irish actor in the altogether, "Shame" is strangely un-sexy.
As successful New Yorker Brandon, Fassbender – who last worked with McQueen playing Bobby Sands in the remarkable 2008 film "Hunger" – spends a great deal of time staring moodily, whether at a potential conquest on the subway or at porn on his computer, where he sits alone at night drinking beer and eating takeout. In "Shame," New York isn't the glittering free-for-all of snares and seductions as much as a hive of lonely, hidden isolates. Even when Brandon is with another person – usually a one-night stand or a prostitute – he's alone.
That changes with the sudden arrival of his little sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), a blond live wire whose hospital bracelet indicates that all is not entirely well with her either. Sissy upsets Brandon's metronomically choreographed rituals, which, it becomes clear, arise from a wound deep in their shared past.
"We're not bad people," Sissy says to him at one point. "We just come from a bad place."
That's as specific as it gets in "Shame," which leaves motivations and back stories up to the viewer's imagination and focuses with unblinking frankness on the depths of Brandon's most self-loathing behavior and his increasingly frantic attempts to hide it. The closest he gets to revealing authentic emotion is when he begins to cry listening to Sissy sing a lugubrious version of "New York, New York," which Mulligan transforms into a ballad of loneliness and longing in one of the film's most astonishing set pieces.
In any other actor's hands, Brandon would be an impossibly repellent character, but Fassbender infuses him with enough sympathy and vulnerability to make him not just watchable but unforgettable. This becomes all the more necessary in the film's unsettling, graphically explicit climax, when Brandon seeks to purge his demons in a sequence that resembles a sickening binge, leaving the audience enervated and vicariously hung over.
McQueen ends his portrait where he began it, leaving it up to viewers to decide whether Brandon has won the fight or is still on his suicide mission, death by little death.
SHAME
3 stars
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, Nicole Beharie and James Badge Dale
Director: Steve McQueen
99 minutes
Rated NC-17 (explicit sexual content, nudity, language, drugs)
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