The Star Wars prequels were fine.Brandon (Michael Fassbender) prepares for sex with quiet, unsmiling ease. Indeed, he seems to spend much of his day preparing for sex, in one way or another. He picks up women. He makes arrangements with hookers. At home, he stares intently at laptop porn with the self-induced trance of ritual. His work computer has so much illicit material that the IT guy assumes it must be a virus.
He's an attractive, suave guy with what looks like a well-paying job. Given this, his Manhattan apartment looks a little bare and shabby -- unadorned, at least. Watching Shame and observing Brandon's life, you begin to understand why: sex takes up most of his time, occupies most of his mind, and overrides most other concerns. He's so in control of his addiction -- and so similar to a certain sort of male mindset -- that it takes some time to register as such. But like a proper addict, he remains in search of his next hit. We don't see much of his friends, hobbies, or that office job -- because he doesn't, either.
A glimpse of family life comes when his unreliable sibling Sissy (Carey Mulligan), an aspiring singer, arrives unexpectedly and crashes with Brandon for a few days. There are hints of a rough shared past, in Sissy's sometimes rueful tone and her willful lack of boundaries (she shows up at his apartment unannounced, and steps out of the shower to greet him when he comes home), but Brandon doesn't much want to talk about it. He shows disdain for Sissy's obvious flakiness and lashes out at her in arguments that sometimes begin with playful sibling contentiousness but almost always end in bitterness and bile. Brandon can't quite say what really seems to be bothering him: interacting with his wayward sister keeps him from a nonstop cycle of sex and masturbation.
Cowriter and director Steve McQueen, who last worked with Fassbender on Hunger, shoots Shame in long takes, and the scenes themselves are long, too, even when there are cuts. In one scene, Brandon and his coworker David (James Badge Dale) go to a club to watch Sissy sing. As Mulligan performs a heartbreakingly stripped-down, dirge version of "New York, New York," McQueen cuts between fixed close-ups of her and fixed close-ups of Fassbender, back and forth, slowly, until the song is through and Brandon must suppress his emotional reaction. Later, there is an unbroken take, shot from behind Brandon's couch, of the siblings arguing to a (which is to say Sissy's) breaking point. Brandon refuses to yield and McQueen refuses to look away.
By covering just a few days in Brandon's life, McQueen allows the character's relationships to develop and deflate before our eyes. When Brandon goes on a date with another coworker, Marianne (Nicole Beharie), McQueen again uses a long single take for their dinner scene as Fassbender squirms a little, far beneath his smooth exterior, at the possibility of making an actual human connection. Brandon seems unsure if this is a real date, or if he's laying the groundwork for more sex, which gives a quiet, nonconfrontational scene a dash of real-world suspense.
This kind of immersion into a character's dead-ending world has plenty of hazards. Sometimes, McQueen borders on admiration of Brandon -- or maybe just the actor playing him. Every other man in the movie looks anxious and sweaty next to Fassbender's icy efficiency. When Brandon's sort-of buddy David approaches a woman at a bar, his desperate incompetence goes over the top, while the same woman needs only to meet Brandon's eyes before propositioning him later. He has an effect on women equal to Tom Cruise's effect on everyone in Eyes Wide Shut, and this movie takes place in actual New York, not a dreamy, half-surreal soundstage version of it.
But even factoring in a smidge of movie-star worship to go along with Fassbender's movie-star bravery, as well as a dash of late-movie melodrama as Brandon rampages through the night, the danger that Shame will become a wallow into miserable waters of meaningless sex is never fully realized. McQueen is so attentive to little details that his movie is neither as repetitive, nor as dull, nor even as depressing as it probably should be. As in Eyes Wide Shut, sometimes the ridiculousness of Brandon's obsession has a dark humor to it, especially when he's cornered.
The actors provide immeasurable assistance. Fassbender's controlled mix of charm and danger makes him the perfect fit playing a guy who's half lothario, and half (okay, probably more than half) empty husk of a man. As Sissy, Mulligan is nearly as good, showing how she manages a pain that, it's implied, must be similar to Brandon's, with different techniques and results. Both leads, especially Fassbender, do a lot of acting without a barrage of dialogue. One of the movie's most evocative shots simply follows Fassbender on a jog through Manhattan. It may look like exercise but there, and throughout the movie, you can tell he's running from something.
