A Sundance favourite and award winner, Sean Durkin’s debut feature Martha Marcy May Marlene (henceforth MMMM) tells the story of Martha (also known as Marcy May, and sometimes answering the phone as Marlene), played by Elizabeth Olsen (she’s the talented one), who escapes from a cultish farm set-up as the film begins. Her estranged sister Lucy (Sarah Poulson), whom she hasn’t spoken to in two years, picks her up and takes her to a lakeside house where Martha, Lucy and Lucy’s husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) will struggle to come to terms with Martha’s post-cult ‘condition’. In flashbacks we see what living on the farm entailed for Martha: no inhibitions regarding sexual privacy and nudity; occasional rape; subservience to the males on the farm.
It should make for riveting viewing. But MMMM is pretentious, self-indulgent, and tedious when it should be compelling. The main reasons to watch the film is to see the birth of a fine new actor (Olsen) and to see the great character actor John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone) exude creepiness and danger in a homely, sometimes disarming manner as Patrick the cult patriarch.
MMMM barely works as a character drama or thriller in spite of some successfully unsettling images and themes. It’s slow in a self-indulgent manner, as if the film does not know when to move on from one scene to the next. The story structure – flipping back and forth between past and present – simply highlights how much more exciting the farm-based material is than the present-day lake house scenes with Martha and her family (and even the farm-based scenes get boring – scenes and shots go on and on long after they’ve done their job). I question whether this non-linear style really contributes anything to the themes and contents of the film. If something happens in the present – Martha goes swimming in the lake completely nude – then there’s a past section to tell us why she swims naked. There’s nothing fresh about the approach.
It should make for riveting viewing. But MMMM is pretentious, self-indulgent, and tedious when it should be compelling. The main reasons to watch the film is to see the birth of a fine new actor (Olsen) and to see the great character actor John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone) exude creepiness and danger in a homely, sometimes disarming manner as Patrick the cult patriarch.
MMMM barely works as a character drama or thriller in spite of some successfully unsettling images and themes. It’s slow in a self-indulgent manner, as if the film does not know when to move on from one scene to the next. The story structure – flipping back and forth between past and present – simply highlights how much more exciting the farm-based material is than the present-day lake house scenes with Martha and her family (and even the farm-based scenes get boring – scenes and shots go on and on long after they’ve done their job). I question whether this non-linear style really contributes anything to the themes and contents of the film. If something happens in the present – Martha goes swimming in the lake completely nude – then there’s a past section to tell us why she swims naked. There’s nothing fresh about the approach.
While Olsen’s Martha is a solid character, someone who’d been damaged long before arriving on Patrick’s farm and who convincingly struggles to come to terms with what has happened to her, Lucy is little more than an emotional sounding board and Ted seems to be constructed almost wholly on his British accent. Olsen, like the brave Gabourey Sidibe in that terrible piece of exploitation Precious, delivers a performance that deserves a much better film. I’ll give MMMM credit for avoiding the “woman-as-victim” cliché and for its thrilling open ending, but overall the film is a frustrating slog.
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