24 Jan Martha Marcy May Marlene

Review by Jack Wormell

Dir: Sean Durkin
UK Release: 3^rd February

Just released this weekend is Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene and I’ve been unable to banish the rhythmic staccato of the title from my mind ever since I saw the trailer back at the end of December. It’s haunted me, fitting for a film whose titular character is certainly a haunted one. Reviewers have called Durkin’s film this years Winter’s Bone, due to the fact that both films take place in rural settings coursing with an undercurrent of violence, they both have strong lead performances from up-and-coming female actors and they both have the wiry John Hawkes playing a frightening back woods pyscho. In reality they are completely different films; where Winter’s Bone was about a girl overcoming the harsh odds stacked against her and her family, as well as documenting a particular way of life in a specific location (the Ozark Mountains in Missouri), Martha… details one girls loss of her identity and the fractured, haunted state she is left in.  There is no familial heart to this film like in Winter’s Bone, although ironically Martha is caught between two different families; Martha… is a much more nightmarish vision of disintegration, one that is deeply affecting, powerful and scary.

The film is told through flashbacks, although you could argue that rather than dealing with past and present, the film’s structure parallels Martha’s (Elizabeth Olsen) mental state, caught as she is between the horror of her life on Patrick’s (John Hawkes) Catskills commune and her sister Lucy’s consumer lakeside haven in Connecticut; the two parallel narratives seem to play out simultaneously for Martha, precipitating her state of confusion, panic and despondency, flitting as she does between them. Martha’s face, in a brilliant performance by Olsen, has a remote expression that belies nothing, creating in her a mysterious obliqueness. This aspect of Olsen’s performance is one of the film’s strongest elements; Martha, although severely disturbed and fragile in many ways, is a strong character; at times she jovial and friendly with her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) at other times she attacks their lifestyle, their unnecessarily large holiday home, their attachment to social rules such as wearing a swimming costume when swimming. Rather than playing her as a gibbering, fragile wreck (think Natalie Portman in Black Swan) Olsen gives Martha a lot more depth and inscrutability, which echoes the film as a whole. Even though what happens to Martha and what she witnesses on Patrick’s commune is horrific, we can still see the logic in her criticisms of Lucy and Ted’s attitudes; and this is less a discussion of two opposing ways of life, and more of an expression of Martha’s confusion, her inability to settle into normality because perhaps, part of her longs to be back at Patrick’s, ‘I am a teacher and a leader!’, she declaims to Lucy during an argument, practically quoting Patrick verbatim. The outcome of all of this is that internally Martha is desperately clawing around, searching for herself. This is the lasting affect that life at Patrick’s has had on her; he renames her (‘You look like more of a Marcy May’) and slowly breaks down her identity through his simultaneous charity, intimidation, and much worse.