Illustration from La Dame en Bois by Roger Dombre, 1910
My special lady friend and I picked our third and final Sundance movie kind of randomly - Martha Marcy May Marlene would work in our schedule as a double-feature with Incendies, and we wanted to see at least one of the festival's official entries up for awards. We didn't really know that it was one of the "buzz movies" of this year's festival, although it doesn't take long to work out why it would be. The big story of the last few years at Sundance has been breakout actresses - Carey Mulligan (An Education) and Jennifer Lawrence (Winter's Bone) both made big splashes at Sundance with impressive lead performances. Martha Marcy May Marlene is another highly dramatic movie anchored by an unknown actress - this time around it's Elizabeth Olsen, who comes with the additional cache/baggage of being a sister to the Olsen twins of Full House. Going from cameos in her big sisters' flims straight to a movie in which she is the focal point of almost every scene is a big jump, and, it could be a big deal if she manages to pull it off. As a bonus, Martha Marcy May Marlene also has a solid supporting cast, including Hugh Dancy, Sarah Paulson (from Studio 60), and John Hawkes (who, coincidentally, got nominated yesterday for an Oscar for his role in Winter's Bone.)
So, has Elizabeth Olsen pulled it off? If you've been reading any of the reports from the Festival, you know that so far the answer seems to be "yes", and I tend to agree with the Sundance crowd on this one. Martha Marcy May Marlene opens on a farm in upstate New York, where Martha (Olsen) is living in a big house with a bunch of young people, a rough-looking middle-aged man, and a bunch of kids. It's immediately apparent that she is part of an "alternative lifestyle" group of some kind - although the word "cult" is never used in the movie, you'd be hard-pressed to keep that word from your thoughts as Martha's story unfolds.
The plot kicks off with Martha running away from "home" and calling her estranged sister Lucy for help. Lucy (Paulson) takes Martha to an opulent summer home on a lake in Connecticut, where she is staying with her husband, an English architect named Ted (Dancy). The remainder of the movie is basically watching Martha decompress painfully, attempting to unpack the emotional baggage of her recent experience. This is revealed through a simple parallel structure, contrasting her reunion with her successful but emotionally distant sister in the lake house's bourgeois opulence with her traumatic flashbacks to her time with the prophet Patrick (Hawkes) and his family. This flashback-based storytelling works very well, though, thanks to a deliberately-paced but brainy script from director/writer Sean Durkin - the narrative flow was almost on par with what we'd seen earlier in the evening with Incendies.
The performances of the leads in Martha Marcy May Marlene are quite strong, from Hawkes channeling Charles Manson and David Koresh at turns to Dancy and Paulson's uptight familial benevolence. But the whole thing hangs on Elizabeth Olsen, whose anxious energy and innocent look make a compelling emotional center for the story. Oddly, though, Durkin seems overly preoccupied with Olsen's body - her nascent sensuality is an essential element of the plot, but the camera often lingers on her curves in an almost lascivious way that is at odds with the sense of creeping dread that otherwise pervades the atmosphere.
Martha Marcy May Marlene has a spareness and stillness to it that may be entirely intentional, but they may also be circumstantial, the byproduct of limitations in the production's resources. Regardless, the lack of music and the claustrophobic use of the two houses for the setting work to the movie's overall advantage. After the movie was over, Durkin and Olsen took questions from the audience, discussing the source material that led to the movie's genesis and various details of the production. It was interesting to hear them speak, enforcing the growing impression I had that we'll be seeing more of the evident talents of Durkin and Olsen in coming years.
"Brainwashed" by the Kinks
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