Didn't expect much from this but it held me in my seat. James Spader started out playing the preppy that his own background probably prepared him for. There was a transitional period and then he wound up playing characters that were veritable refugees from Weirdsville. The is definitely one of the last type.
But first. Maggie Gillyhaal is a young woman who has a tendency to cut herself, kind of like Sylvia Plath, and is sent to a psychiatric hospital where several unctuous keepers treat her. Released, she must deal with her alcoholic father and overprotective mother. But, relax, it's not that kind of LMW movie.
Maggie is a wistful lady, maybe in her late 20s, unmarried, and not Hollywood gorgeous although not lacking in appeal. Her voice has a high squeaky mouselike quality that I found rather pleasant. She never gets angry. She does what she's told and everything. (Where do they keep women like this?) She applies for a job as a secretary to an attorney, a rather dark James Spader. Well, I'll tell you, this guy is from some unknown galaxy. In his darkened office he quizzes her during the job interview. Oh, just the usual questions. "Are you pregnant? Do you intend to GET pregnant? Did you have sex with your boyfriend?"
If she is a masochist, he is her perfect match because he gets a tickle out of dealing out punishment. It begins with small things -- he overreacts when he finds a typo in one of her letters. The humiliation takes on more bizarre forms. (This babe has never heard of "an unfriendly work environment," never mind "sexual harassment.") Finally he has her bend over the desk, close to a flawed letter she has produced, and spanks her bottom really hard, as in WHACK, as she reads it aloud twice.
She doesn't cry or wince. In fact she rather gets excited and runs to the bathroom for self-induced satisfaction. Now, I realize that this may sound a bit odd, but that there are myriad women out there with exactly these impulses is a fact of which I am absolutely convinced after an entire adult lifetime spent perusing "Penthouse Forum." It gets more twisted and more openly sexual but without body contact between the two of them. She craves it but he can't bring himself to make love to her, if anything he's more psychologically crippled than she is. Gillynhaal makes these scenes somehow believable. While she's bent over the desk with her skivvies pulled down, waiting for him to do something to her from behind, her face is tense with fear, expectation, and desire, and her eyes wander from side to side like a child's. The movie is exciting, perverse, funny, and gripping, all at once.
Poor Spader becomes ridden with guilt. (Things are getting a bit warm for him in a human sense, if you see what I mean.) So he backs off, so to speak, and reverts to his cold mechanical demanding remote self without the frisson of spanking. The problem is she's gotten to like it. It's taken the place of the self abuse that led to her hospitalization. Finally, realizing that he can't stop his growing involvement with her, Spader fires her, but she keeps bothering him because she's become attached to him, and not just for the spanking.
When she invades his office just before she's supposed to marry another, Spader decides to make demands of her that she can't possibly fulfill, so that the thing can be ended for good. He orders her to sit at her desk without moving her feet from the floor or her two hands from the desk top. Then he leaves and goes about his business rather sweatily because, after all, this is a test for him too. She sits there motionless, in the same position, visited by her boyfriend and various others who are about as useful as Job's comforters. (Maggie wets her pants and her mother says, "I want that dress back within a week -- dry cleaned.")
Spader finally realizes that Maggie has won the contest, returns to his office where she is still obediently sitting, now with her face on the desktop, her dress filthy, not having eaten for three days, picks her up, carries her to the bathroom and bathes her, then makes gentle love to her, while she smiles with satisfaction and asks him questions like, "What did it say under your picture in the high school yearbook? Who first broke your heart?" (The script is nicely written. Not too much and not too little.)
Maybe I've made this sound like one of those extremely stilted R-rated movies that show up late at night on some premium channels, with some hairy dominant male slapping the buns of some glossy blonde who can't act either but can muster up a lot of squirms and happy giggles -- but it isn't that at all. It's sexy, yes, but there is only brief nudity and only one spanking scene. The impression we're left with is of two inadequate people, each of whose problems have been ameliorated (not solved) by the other. You could substitute alcoholism or some other substance addiction for the S-M and have an essentially similar plot.
Spader is a decent actor and he gives the role a great deal of effort here. Gillynhaal I've not seen in anything else but she's quite good. She has one scene alone that's rather startling. In the very last shot of her face she gazes at Spader's departing car then slowly turns and stares for several long seconds directly into the nearby camera with a slight smile, as if daring us to judge her.
But first. Maggie Gillyhaal is a young woman who has a tendency to cut herself, kind of like Sylvia Plath, and is sent to a psychiatric hospital where several unctuous keepers treat her. Released, she must deal with her alcoholic father and overprotective mother. But, relax, it's not that kind of LMW movie.
Maggie is a wistful lady, maybe in her late 20s, unmarried, and not Hollywood gorgeous although not lacking in appeal. Her voice has a high squeaky mouselike quality that I found rather pleasant. She never gets angry. She does what she's told and everything. (Where do they keep women like this?) She applies for a job as a secretary to an attorney, a rather dark James Spader. Well, I'll tell you, this guy is from some unknown galaxy. In his darkened office he quizzes her during the job interview. Oh, just the usual questions. "Are you pregnant? Do you intend to GET pregnant? Did you have sex with your boyfriend?"
If she is a masochist, he is her perfect match because he gets a tickle out of dealing out punishment. It begins with small things -- he overreacts when he finds a typo in one of her letters. The humiliation takes on more bizarre forms. (This babe has never heard of "an unfriendly work environment," never mind "sexual harassment.") Finally he has her bend over the desk, close to a flawed letter she has produced, and spanks her bottom really hard, as in WHACK, as she reads it aloud twice.
She doesn't cry or wince. In fact she rather gets excited and runs to the bathroom for self-induced satisfaction. Now, I realize that this may sound a bit odd, but that there are myriad women out there with exactly these impulses is a fact of which I am absolutely convinced after an entire adult lifetime spent perusing "Penthouse Forum." It gets more twisted and more openly sexual but without body contact between the two of them. She craves it but he can't bring himself to make love to her, if anything he's more psychologically crippled than she is. Gillynhaal makes these scenes somehow believable. While she's bent over the desk with her skivvies pulled down, waiting for him to do something to her from behind, her face is tense with fear, expectation, and desire, and her eyes wander from side to side like a child's. The movie is exciting, perverse, funny, and gripping, all at once.
Poor Spader becomes ridden with guilt. (Things are getting a bit warm for him in a human sense, if you see what I mean.) So he backs off, so to speak, and reverts to his cold mechanical demanding remote self without the frisson of spanking. The problem is she's gotten to like it. It's taken the place of the self abuse that led to her hospitalization. Finally, realizing that he can't stop his growing involvement with her, Spader fires her, but she keeps bothering him because she's become attached to him, and not just for the spanking.
When she invades his office just before she's supposed to marry another, Spader decides to make demands of her that she can't possibly fulfill, so that the thing can be ended for good. He orders her to sit at her desk without moving her feet from the floor or her two hands from the desk top. Then he leaves and goes about his business rather sweatily because, after all, this is a test for him too. She sits there motionless, in the same position, visited by her boyfriend and various others who are about as useful as Job's comforters. (Maggie wets her pants and her mother says, "I want that dress back within a week -- dry cleaned.")
Spader finally realizes that Maggie has won the contest, returns to his office where she is still obediently sitting, now with her face on the desktop, her dress filthy, not having eaten for three days, picks her up, carries her to the bathroom and bathes her, then makes gentle love to her, while she smiles with satisfaction and asks him questions like, "What did it say under your picture in the high school yearbook? Who first broke your heart?" (The script is nicely written. Not too much and not too little.)
Maybe I've made this sound like one of those extremely stilted R-rated movies that show up late at night on some premium channels, with some hairy dominant male slapping the buns of some glossy blonde who can't act either but can muster up a lot of squirms and happy giggles -- but it isn't that at all. It's sexy, yes, but there is only brief nudity and only one spanking scene. The impression we're left with is of two inadequate people, each of whose problems have been ameliorated (not solved) by the other. You could substitute alcoholism or some other substance addiction for the S-M and have an essentially similar plot.
Spader is a decent actor and he gives the role a great deal of effort here. Gillynhaal I've not seen in anything else but she's quite good. She has one scene alone that's rather startling. In the very last shot of her face she gazes at Spader's departing car then slowly turns and stares for several long seconds directly into the nearby camera with a slight smile, as if daring us to judge her.