Login
Here’s a novelty for you: an Olsen sibling who can act. I mean, really and truly act her ass of. Elizabeth Olsen deserves a major and long-lasting career based purely on the strength of this lone performance. The movie surrounding it should have risen to her level, but what’s there is effective if never transcendent. While the sense of paranoia and time-jumps do realistically place us in the mind of Martha, there are moments and thin characterizations which dwindle and handicap the overall effect of the story.
Hugh Dancy and Sarah Paulson perform their roles well, but are given limited and thinly plotted roles to work with. We share their sense of frustration and annoyance with Martha and her random outbursts, but aside from being both supportive and vexed about her they aren’t given much to work with. The same goes for most of the members of the cult who merge into a legion without making much of an impression. This could have been a stylistic choice of the director’s to continually ground us in Martha’s perspective, but supporting characters eventually become interchangeable. Naturally, only John Hawkes as the cult leader really makes any kind of lasting impression. He looks like a scarecrow that’s been covered in flesh, and is modulated enough to seem otherworldly. A scene in which he performs his “love” song for Martha is one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in some time.
And there’s two moments which the film stumbles over and probably seemed like better ideas on paper than they did when put into motion on screen. One involves a home invasion which quickly turns into something out of a horror film and stands in startling contrast to the film built around it. Don’t misunderstand me, there are true moments of dread throughout the film but this particular one just smells of a desperate, cheap scare. The other is the ending. Martha’s time-jumps are almost too clever, and the constant need to try and put us in her frame of mind lead to an ambiguous ending that the film doesn’t truly feel like it’s earned. My gut reaction was more of an eye roll and shrug of “Of course that’s how it ended….” But one scene in which Martha prepares a new-comer for the ritualistic rape – preparing her drink, soothingly talking to her about it, encouraging her to have fun – is most disturbing for how banally it’s treated. That she wakes up and pees herself lets the mind wonder – dreaming of a memory, or was that not real at all?
Still, Martha Marcy May Marlene is ambitious and well-acted enough for me to have enjoyed it far more than any of its myriad of problems. But, as far as first feature’s go, this is mightily impressive and I look forward to seeing more of what Olsen and the director have to offer.
