Martha Marcy May Marlene (5/10)

December 11th, 2011

Garnering all sorts of praise for its breakout lead performance from Elizabeth Olsen, and a few more for its clever use of dual timelines, I remained curiously unshaken and unstirred by the latest cult movie about a cult, Martha Marcy May Marlene. Olsen is excellent, it is true, and so is this site’s favourite John Hawkes, but an open ending and general vagueness found me more appreciative of the parts that make up the movie, rather than the movie itself.

Timeline One: the two-year period that Martha (Olsen) was part of the unnamed cult in upstate New York. She is introduced to the leader, Patrick (Hawkes), who is everything we expect from a cult leader. By day he gets the girls to till the fields, by night he’s rogering them all up the back passage. Now we’re in the 21st century, I’d really like to see a cult form on something other than good crop and bed rotation, but that day has yet to arrive. Patrick renames the waif – Marcy May, he decides, in a tribute to the lead singer of Columbus Ohio’s Scrawl, perhaps – and turns his persuasive charm up to eleven. Using unblinking eye-contact, force of will and a good old fashioned self-penned campfire guitar song in the girl’s name, she is prepared for her debut performance – and later persuaded to embrace the beauty of it all.

Over time, Patrick’s mood changes. Cults are rarely able to gather new members if the leader is advertised as a manic despot, after all. From his early sweetness and light stage, he gently moves towards other women and ulterior motives. Martha’s not dumb; she sees what’s going on and what’s not, but she’s also in some sort of love.

Timeline Two: Martha is reunited with her worried-sick sister (Sarah Paulson) and her yuppie architect husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) in their large cabin. She tells the pair nothing of her former life, only to say that she was with a man, the man lied, so she left. They take her at her word, and brush off the occasional oddities she gets up to in her new home. Swimming naked, for example, or sneaking into the couple’s bed while they’re making love. (Parents of small children will understand the horror this brings to the coupling couple.) Ted is not happy. A stressed-out architect, he has just two weeks’ holiday a year to unwind, and a crazed sister-in-law is not what’s required.

Writer/director Sean Durkin weaves the two periods together, often without announcement. Martha jumps into the water at the cabin, but appears underwater back at the cult. It takes a little getting used to, and is quite deliberate. Were this movie to have any great moral, it would be off-putting. The fact that it hasn’t, though, only indicates its desire to head towards deliberate befuddlement, or as a way to contrast and compare the two settings. Nudity and free sex is OK at the cult, but is frowned upon in civilised society. Possessions mean everything to the married couple, but are communally shared and valueless under Patrick’s unblinking eye. I didn’t appreciate these comparisons, subjective as they were.

I’m a story and dialogue man, there’s no two ways about it, and Martha Marcy May Marlene has neither. Yes, it looks good – excellent framing and all-round cinematography is standard here – but to me it came off as an unfinished piece, one devoid of a purpose. It’s different to the norm, it builds up a decent amount of dread-suspense, and is a cut above most of its big-budget movie cousins to its credit, but it’s more there to be admired than loved. Olsen deserves acting recognition for it, and I hope she gets it. Other than that, it wasn’t for me.