Review
US – Fox Searchlight Pictures (3 February 2012)
The film opens on Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), a young woman who escapes from a pastoral, hippy-like commune to call her older sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), for help. Lucy and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) pick Martha up and invite her to stay with them in their beautiful out-of-the-city home, while she recuperates and the two siblings re-connect. Over the course of a few days, through a series of flashbacks, we come to see just what happened to Martha during her absence from home and how it has affected her.
The first thing to say about Martha Marcy May Marlene is that it features, in Olsen, a breakout, star-making turn. Facially similar to her older, better known twin siblings Mary-Kate and Ashley, she also recalls Maggie Gyllenhaal, not only in feature but in voice and indeed talent; expect to see a lot more of her.
Also comfortably in the one-to-watch category is the first-time director, Sean Durkin, and his cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes. Together they have crafted a film that is gorgeous to behold; here Martha is framed outside a window as the sharp shrill of a telephone disturbs the audience on the other side. There she is seen, just head above water, in wide shot, lost and adrift.
Most striking however is how we are dealt the details that make us understand that what Martha has escaped is not merely a commune but an abusive, dangerous cult. In one scene Martha dives off her brother-in-law’s boat and resurfaces in a cove with her other family. Little reminders in the present time send us off into a memory of her experience in the commune, almost as if the film is presented in her own stream of consciousness; undoubtedly, it is this that is Martha Marcy May Marlene‘s masterstroke.
There are niggles, however. Clearly, the film is concerned with identity (Martha is renamed Marcy May in the commune, and pretends to be Marlene when answering the phone – hence the title) and in many respects it is successful in showing us how the mental state of Martha has been fractured by the cult’s coolly seductive patriarch, Patrick (John Hawkes). But there is a lack of universality in the concept. When Martha re-homes with Lucy and Ted, she shows disdain for their capitalist excesses and remarks that ‘it’s not the right way to live’; the excesses of the cult, however, eliminate any argument against it. Wouldn’t it be more interesting – more challenging – if there were the possibility that Martha was right? Wouldn’t it be more provocative to suggest that the conventional family structure that Lucy and Ted represent is not the ideal? For a film so otherwise restrained, it’s disappointing that the cult are seen finally given to extremes that remove any trace of debate. It’s as if the film has a split personality of its own.
In the end what we have in Martha Marcy May Marlene is a thriller that is meditative and pretty though not particularly thrilling. See it for Olsen.
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