Movie Summary of Shame by Michael The Moviegoer.

SHAME = **

“Barely There”

“Shame” is a movie in search of a purpose. It’s the second feature from a director who dares to work under the name Steve McQueen. It stars the currently hot Michael Fassbender in a role that allows him to bare all by going fully frontal and earning the film an NC-17 rating from the overly conservative MPAA.

Fassbender plays a sex addict in McQueen’s film which is an in-depth character study of a man who “suffers” from sex addiction. He seems to be addicted to the mechanics of sex but not the pleasures of it. “Shame” makes sex look cold and unfeeling, and never clearly defines the sex addict as a character. There have been many clinical studies that claim all men have a sexual thought every seven seconds. If that’s true, how can you identify a sex addict, or are we all to be labeled as one?

“Shame” distastefully flirts with crossing the line into incest in the way that Fassbender’s character interacts with his sister played by Carey Mulligan. Their relationship is central to the movie’s climax (no pun intended), yet the sexual undercurrent between them is just gross. In their first scene together we’re not even sure they’re brother and sister. He walks in on her taking a shower in his apartment and they stand there having a rather long conversation with Mulligan fully frontally nude in front of him.

McQueen’s style is to shoot long unedited scenes in static shots. But what happens in those scenes is nothing more than small-talk chit-chat between characters. In a restaurant, an extra playing a waiter reading the specials and taking a dinner order has nearly as much dialogue as the principal actors in the scene. And that scene is about as interesting as watching two strangers in a restaurant order dinner, yet it goes on for nearly ten minutes.

Another bizarre scene is Carey Mulligan as a lounge singer in a nightclub performing a slow-jazz rendition of “New York, New York”, mostly in close-up, and the song drags on for what seems like an eternity.

“Shame” is an interesting piece of work, but ultimately unsatisfying, much like all the sexual encounters in this movie. For an NC-17 movie that’s supposed to be sexually edgy, “Shame” is shamefully dull.

DVD Double Feature:

For the fast-growing legion of Michael Fassbender fans, here’s one you probably missed and should see immediately. It’s 2009’s “Fish Tank” by British director Andrea Arnold. In this stunningly impressive indie urban drama Fassbender plays a man who has an affair with the daughter of his girlfriend with disastrous results.

Michael The Moviegoer