Film Review: SECRETARY **** (out of 5)
A withdrawn young woman, recently released from a psychiatric ward, takes a job in a small law firm where she develops a kinky relationship with her new boss.
The year’s least politically correct movie, Secretary is bound to raise a few hackles in a country like the United States, where we are so unaccountably terrified of sex in all of its manifestations. Never mind power, or speaking of sex and power together. Although there hasn’t been a good, honest portrayal of heterosexuality in an American film since The Last Picture Show (1971) — well, okay, maybe since Jane Fonda’s Oscar-winning, shocked orgasm in Coming Home (1979) –we are constantly being told that movie screens are overflowing with gratuitous “sex.” The truth is, any sex that does turn up at the Cineplex is either adolescent titillation, or the occasional post-coital pan over heaps of clothing strewn across a floor to find the couple talking dreamily in each other’s arms, covered up to the neck.
Where sex is involved, the American camera is always a minute late and a dollar short, and it always has been, so it is fitting that Secretary, the most mature, humane and funny film about sexuality made in this country in a long time, should be concerned with the infantile power games and symbolism of bondage and discipline (a.k.a. B&D). Based on a short story by Mary Gaitskill, in a collection called Bad Behavior, the film’s plot arc sounds like a letter to Penthouse circa 1981: shy girl gets job with persnickety boss, boss spanks girl when she makes mistakes, girl begins to make mistakes on purpose.
Secretary is a comedy, to be sure, but its power and dramatic impact flow out of fully developed characters, people who are based on psychological realities rather than wishful thinking (or demographic fears). The film’s protagonist Lee Holloway begins the film as a recovering victim of depression, a woman who reacts to the tensions of her codependent family life with self-mutilation, keeping a sewing kit ever-handy for the purpose of cutting herself where it won’t show and bandaging the evidence. As soon as she is out of the hospital, Lee reverts to this practice, forced to live with her clueless parents, whose numbskull behavior inspired her to take on the sins of the world in the first place. Closed off from allowing herself to feel real emotion, Lee mortifies her own flesh to stay in touch with a sense of being alive.
When she meets E. Edward Grey, her first real boss in her first real job, she discovers a kindred, wounded spirit. Grey is just as shattered by the dullness of contemporary life as Lee, falling into obsessive-compulsive patterns and secretly pining for his lost marriage, appearing on the surface to be an unlikely dominant personality. But because Grey is fragile himself, he recognizes Lee’s particular sensitivities and begins to push her toward revealing them.
What makes Secretary so frequently hilarious in the midst of all this psychic darkness is its persistent willingness to take sexual “deviance” just a little bit seriously. Most films touching upon any kind of sadomasochism have traditionally snickered at the participants, as if each viewer in the audience did not have some oddball silliness in their own personal closets. But Secretary is meticulously plausible, and patient, in exploring the connections between pain and pleasure, normal and not-normal, anxiety and love, childish games and arousal (ever tie someone up just for fun when you were a kid? ever get tied up yourself? no? well,…try it!). Structured like a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy, Secretary becomes a nutty, thoroughly enjoyable movie when Lee falls in love with Edward, a man whom her counselors might well encourage her to betray to the authorities, and the conventions of boy-meets-girl are turned upside down and shaken into free fall, no telling where they’ll land. The film’s most pertinent exchange of dialogue comes at the end of act two, when a guilt-stricken Edward tells Lee they cannot continue their liberating, master/slave play forever, and she asks in all innocence, “Why not?” After all, no one is watching. Except, of course, those of us in the audience.
In the role of Lee, Maggie Gyllenhaal provides the film’s center, a radiant performer getting her first chance to shine, in a part most established actresses would shun. It’s a multi-layered acting job, taking Lee through numerous incarnations, from infinitely mousy wallflower to sexual tiger to determined adult, with a comic skill worthy of Lily Tomlin and a burning sensuality that would (or should) make any supermodel blush head-to-toe. Several critics have predicted that Secretary will make Gyllenhaal a star, and while it is too early to know for sure — a lot of people have to see this movie for that to happen – there is no doubt this is one of the year’s best performances. The camera adores Gyllenhaal’s impish, mutable face, making sure she lingers in the mind long after the film ends.
Secretary has many other good performances, particularly James Spader, who has specialized for most of his career in believable weirdoes, having one of his finest hours as Lee’s totally screwed-up boss. The fact that Gyllenhaal is so wonderful in this movie is due in no small part to her undeniable chemistry with Spader, who gives her a rich, unpredictable foil to react against.
If Secretary has failings, it is in the screenplay’s insistence on following the romantic comedy formula too closely for the sake of consistency, and in director Steven Shainberg’s R-rated circumspection, his tastefully vanilla handling of the actual B&D scenes, unintentionally ironic for a liberal-minded film about pushing limits. But in spite of these minor flaws, Secretary remains a refreshing film, the movie that 9 ½ Weeks thought it was and failed miserably to be.
A sex comedy for the 21st century, Steven Shainberg’s Secretary is a step in the right direction for a culture that views any sexual difference as an intractable step toward madness. It’s a genuine film for adults, one that portrays the line between irrational desire and the politics of the everyday as an invisible and arbitrary barrier, always subject to situational ethics. And Shainberg seems to be a filmmaker who knows that Personality, the most misunderstood of American commodities, is only hard on the outside; on the inside, regardless of social position, we’re all just lonely kids searching for the right friend to play with.
Secretary
directed by Steven Shainberg; screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson, adapted by Wilson and Steven Shainberg, from story by Mary Gaitskill; director of photography, Steven Fierberg; edited by Pam Wise; music by Angelo Badalamente
with: James Spader (E. Edward Grey), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Lee Holloway), Jeremy Davies (Peter), Patrick Bachau (Dr. Twardon)
1 hr., 44 m.; Lions Gate, rated R
release date: September 20
Notes:
Won a Special Jury Prize for Originality at Sundance in January.
Maggie Gyllenhaal is the older sister of Jake Gyllenhaal. They acted together in Donnie Darko (2001)
Eric Barker is a writer and independent filmmaker living in Denver.
