Martha Marcy May Marlene
by grandhotelabyss
A very bad movie, in an all-too-typical way. Wikipedia summarizes the plot:
The film focuses on Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), a young woman who flees from an abusive cult in the Catskill Mountains that is led by an enigmatic leader, Patrick (John Hawkes). Lucy (Sarah Paulson), Martha’s older sister, receives a call from a pay phone one day from Martha, asking her to come and get her. Martha, who has been missing for two years, slowly begins to assimilate into her sister’s family, but her increasing paranoia leads her to believe that Patrick and his cult may still be watching her every move.
This summary leaves out only two elements of the film: 1. the cult’s actions, according to Martha’s memories at least, center around Patrick’s rape of its female members and also include the systematic robbery and sometimes murder of wealthy families who live nearby its farm; 2. Martha’s sister has married a well-off British architect, and most of Martha’s post-cult conflicts are with him as he preaches to her a gospel of success, while she clings to a belief seemingly instilled into her by the cult, namely, an anti-materialist approach to life.
At the level of form, the film is cliched in its arthouse aesthetics: interminable takes, little to no score, clipped dialogue punctuated by long silences, incidental sound played way up, and all of the above in service to the all-important “telling detail” (“Admire how the director captures that tiny droplet of urine running down her leg!”).
This formal approach effectively empties the film of any content. Drama requires conflict, and there is conflict neither between the characters themselves nor between the confident director and the meaningless material. The director’s gaze is too cool to allow us to see him as anything other than the easy and a priori master of all he surveys. As for the characters, they have no conflict because they stand for nothing. For example: we are never told in any detail what the cult believes. Its leader, Patrick, makes vague New Agey speeches that don’t add up to much. Though Patrick is bookish, the audience is allowed to see the cover of exactly one book in his possession; said book, in a shameful act of near-slander on the part of the filmmakers, is written by Ivan Illich, as if the Catholic anarchist philosopher is just the thing for a murdering rapist to read! In any case, once we see that Patrick is little more than a cruel criminal, a one-dimensional villain, the beliefs of the cult become morally and politically irrelevant, since no beliefs could justify rape and murder.
This neutralization of the cult at the level of theme makes the film a defense of the status quo in ways its makers probably did not intend (though who knows?). When Martha’s brother-in-law smugly rails at her for having no career goals and for not being interested in money, the film offers no countervailing ethics. At first, looking at the early shots of Lucy and her husband’s vast and loveless vacation home, empty and bare-walled according to the spartan aesthetics of haute design, I thought that the film would present the cult as a locus of competing values. But once the cult is shown to be merely the predatory gang of a deranged thug, the audience has little choice but to identify with the good bourgeois couple or else to identify the film as propaganda on its behalf. This film thus neatly reverses the entirely superior Melancholia in forcing us to side with the well-adjusted and wealthy sister.
There is another reading of Martha Marcy May Marlene that makes itself available, though, one enabled by the cool camera eye and its pitiless and incuriously clinical long takes. We could regard the whole narrative as nothing more than the object of our distant, unmoved, complacent, anthropological gaze. We may be invited to snicker with superiority at the actions of all the characters, since we, sane as we are, are above action, above thought, above even feeling. Perhaps the best response to the behavior of everyone depicted in this narrative, killer and killed, fanatic and criminal, lost girl and rich boy, is to make a series of sarcastic and knowing quips. Maybe the only audience filmmakers can imagine for an art-movie these days is one comprised of–to borrow a term–gawkers.
I’ve just been to see the film. Its shit.
When I left the cinema I was unsure. It wasn’t a bad film to sit through and I did not have the urge to leave or play with my smartphone. As you say it has all the psychology of the cult in place and mostly it is done subtlety yet I left the cinema wondering if its gentle treatment of the main theme was deliberate or by accident? The psychological drama has these two blankets that are twisted around the narrative like it is having a bad night’s sleep. That might seem apt for a psychological drama, yet I fear that the metaphor is my struggle with this catatonic drama not the director’s autre.
Firstly, there are wall to wall clichéd art-house shots: languid passes; views through ajar doors; distant sweeps. They’re all there. I didn’t feel that I was watching anything that I had not seen before. They were all technically exquisite yet also so derivative. It looked nice, lets leave it at that.
Secondly, the motives for the cult’s existence are laid-out bare and these become increasingly amplified throughout the movie like in the insomnia dream-state where one loops over and over a detail, each time gaining in sharpness but never achieving focus. The contrast between the farmstead and the bourgeois weekend home on the lake was as course as blanket made from horse hair.
I found this blog because I search for the title and ‘Illich’. I wondered if anyone had noticed that device was almost accusatory, as though he were somehow an evil force driving people to megalomania. It was quite perverse.
The film didn’t need the Illich reference at all, so I wondered why this particular device was deployed.The Director has clearly not understood Illich, if he has been studied at all, because the cult was rigidly formal and used all the techniques of schooling to reinforce the will of teacher and leader. Or maybe that was just another symbol of the cult’s corruption. If so it a point poorly made.
There seemed a crass juxtaposition between this discourse over materialism and Martha’s internal melancholy. It felt like the film was trying too hard to make some ideological point about idealism that was totally alienated from the underlying drama of brainwashing and reinforcement of the cults control. You can almost smell the pitch: “a cult captures vulnerable, idealistic young women and initiates them into a pastoral dystopia. The anti-heroine escapes back to civilisation but struggles with materialism. The film twists on he internal struggle between two dystopias.”
Beyond the thematic issues there were a few machina ex deus moments in the plot that stood out like a sore thumb especially the pivotal moment when Martha is overheard discussing her concern for a wealthy man the cult murder while out on a burglary.
Hanging there all the way through the film like a picture on the wall was the wife of Jim Jones, of the Jamestown/Georgetown People’s Temple Cult, who was called Marceline. Maybe a coincidence or maybe an attempt at clever reference to another cult. If the latter it failed. It simply looked cheap.
Thanks for the space to rant.