Martha Marcy May Marlene

 

3 1/2 Stars

In the right light, it resembles Eden. We're on a commune somewhere in the Catskills region of New York State.

Green fields in the afternoon sun. Laundry on the line. Meals with your "brothers" and "sisters" seated in a womblike farmhouse dining room, presided over by a charismatic father figure.

Nobody in the supple and unnerving feature "Martha Marcy May Marlene" ever uses the word "cult."

Even so, writer-director Sean Durkin immerses the viewer in a fluid state of psychological dissolution, keeping us very close to one woman's experience in a cult by any other name.

Durkin's protagonist -- the young woman played by Elizabeth Olsen, who holds the screen with formidable ease -- is a no-win situation in human form. The story begins with Martha's escape, two years after she first disappeared into the world whose leader, Patrick, is a wily manipulator played by the spectacular John Hawkes, who played Teardrop in "Winter's Bone" in an Oscar-nominated turn. As it proceeds, "Martha Marcy May Marlene" slips in and out of Martha's alarming recent past thanks to an unusually delicate interweave of present-day perplexities and eerie revelations in flashback. Everything seems to be happening at once, past and present.

Martha's only family is an older sister, Lucy, played by Sarah Paulson, who is renting a time-share on a lake in Connecticut with her snippy husband (Hugh Dancy). The couple takes Martha in, warily. The family feeling is scant, fragmented. These sisters never feel safe around each other, not completely. Of her unexplained two-year absence, Martha tells Lucy that she was in a bad relationship with someone she couldn't trust.

Lucy's life and marriage seem no less strange to Martha than the place she has just fled. We learn that Patrick was given to indoctrinating female newcomers by way of a "cleansing" ritual involving drugs and rape. At the start of many of Durkin's scenes, the viewer spends two or three seconds puzzling through the piece at hand. Is this moment a fragment of Martha's old life? Is it a piece of the new one?

Patrick tells his "favorite" that fear is "the most amazing emotion of all," creating "total awareness." He says this to Martha, a.k.a. Marcy May, in a calm purr. At one point Patrick picks up a guitar and sings her a song. This is a fantastically creepy moment because it's almost charming; the corrosive intimacy we see and feel through Martha contrasts with the emotionally sterile manner of living represented by her sister, whose world is beige and vaguely miserable.

Herein lies the chief limitation of a very good film: Lucy's existence, the alternative to Martha's old life, is so grim and emotionally meager that a cult refugee hasn't a chance. On the other hand, the acting in Durkin's feature is excellent. Olsen (one of the showbiz Olsen kids, grown up) is utilized largely as an object for camera adoration, but not in the usual glamorizing way. Olsen, Hawkes and company play slippery figures with lovely assurance. Cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes (who shot the terrific Manhattan indie "Tiny Furniture") makes the rural landscapes and sunsets and interiors look like magic, black or otherwise.

Durkin favors leisurely, Robert Altman-brand takes and slow zooms, guiding our eye here and there to the uneasy interactions at hand. The ending will frustrate many, I'm sure. I love its paradoxically blunt ambiguity, which is the opposite of the unambiguous bluntness you find at the close of "Take Shelter," another current and extremely strong evocation of a hornet's nest of a psyche.

 

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"Martha Marcy May Marlene" Movie Trailer

 

MPAA rating: R (for disturbing violent and sexual content, nudity and language).

Running time: 1:41.

Cast: Elizabeth Olsen (Martha); Sarah Paulson (Lucy); Hugh Dancy (Ted); John Hawkes (Patrick).

Credits: Written and directed by Sean Durkin; produced by Josh Mond, Antonio Campos, Chris Maybach and Patrick Cunningham. A Fox Searchlight Pictures release.

 

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Martha Marcy May Marlene

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Nobody in the supple and unnerving feature 'Martha Marcy May Marlene' ever uses the word 'cult.' Even so, writer-director Sean Durkin immerses the viewer in a fluid state of psychological dissolution, keeping us very close to one woman's experience in a cult

 

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