Shame, shame, shame

It’s hard to believe that either Charlize Theron or Michael Fassbender could look ugly. Both actors (incidentally, starring together in the soon-to-be-released Ridley Scott thriller Prometheus, which is awesome) are known for their screen idol looks, yet both take roles that downplay natural beauty and play up the ugly. Theron, after all, has previously won an Oscar by playing a rather hideous murderer in Monster. Fassbender looks like a matinee idol, but seeks edgy fare like in last year’s Shame, a Steve McQueen look at sexual addiction.

Both Fassbender in Shame and Theron’s performance in the Jason Reitman film Young Adult were critically lauded last year, though nobody got to see those movies locally. Understandably, because Shame wouldn’t have slipped more than five minutes past the MTRCB scissors; it features sex in just about every permutation, except those found in a Lady Gaga video. Young Adult is a dark comedy that features Theron as a very unlikable ghostwriter of high school teen lit, a category known as “Young Adult” in the publishing biz.

Theron is Mavis Gary, a 37-year-old hard-drinking single living with her dog in Minneapolis, stealing one-liners from local teens at the mall, which she then injects into her manuscripts for the “Waverley Prep” book series. A former prom queen, she wakes up every morning in a hung-over stupor and sucks fresh life from a nearby two-liter bottle of Coke Lite. At night, she picks up guys, drinks heavily again, and repeats the cycle — until an e-mail from a former boyfriend (now married) announcing his newborn’s birth stirs her into action: so she packs her Mini Cooper, throws on a ‘90s mix tape — relentlessly cued to Teenage Fanclub’s The Concept — and heads back to Mercury, the small hometown she despises and fled from years ago.

Her look of disgust upon approaching the strip malls of Mercury — the Staples, the KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut conjunctions, the well-lit roadside Chili’s — says a lot about her outlook on life. Mavis has a need to feel she’s better than her roots; when people describe her as a writer, she corrects them: no, she’s an “author,” even though the Waverley Prep series is over, and copies are now stacked in the clearance bin at Mercury’s local bookstore.

Bottom’s up: Charlize Theron plays a scheming author of teen lit in Young Adult.

Theron plays ugly so well, she manages to win us over to her dementia. She befriends a handicapped local, Matt (Patton Oswalt), who sees right through her hauteur and becomes her drinking buddy. After a half dozen scotches, she reveals her true plan: to steal her old flame, Buddy Slade, away from what is, by all accounts, a happy marriage with a new baby.

Director Reitman is rapidly becoming a crackerjack detailer of American mundanity; he dwells on the cheesy details of smalltime life, exposing the utter lack of romance found there. In a way, he’s swapped places with Alexander Payne, a once-edgy auteur who cut through American kitsch in films like Election and Sideways with a samurai blade; now he does more user-friendly films like The Descendants.

Young Adult is a black comedy (written by Diablo Cody, with more dark wit than her earlier hit, Juno) and Theron shows tons of courage in playing out her character’s mean-spirited nature without any added sweeteners. She doesn’t even try to poke around for signs of redemption; what you see is what you get — except when she’s really broken down, drunken and publicly shamed, and so naturally turns to her drinking buddy, Matt, the high school loser she would never even notice back in the day, and wretchedly begs him: “Hide me.”

Fassbender does his own share of hiding in Shame, but his performance is the Full Monty. Literally. In fact, as sex addict Brandon, he enters the opening frame in full-frontal mode. And the hits just keep on coming: threesomes, biracial twosomes, gay-somes, self-somes. Brandon can’t stop thinking about sex, you see, though on the surface he’s a perfectly controlled and buttoned-down yuppie. He does have a tendency towards rage, especially towards his sister Sissy (Carrey Mulligan), who begs to stay in his apartment for a few days/weeks during a breakup with her BF. This arrangement naturally cramps Brandon’s secretive lifestyle, which revolves around working in a nondescript office during the day and porn surfing or going out for one-night stands in the evenings. His rage, we can only guess, is part of the reason he can’t have a normal relationship with a woman.

What’s remarkable about Fassbender’s performance (he reminds you of early Jeremy Irons, without the theatrical languor) is his ability to shift so easily from the picture of normal, upstanding yuppiedom, to crazed freakaholic, trading smoldering looks with ladies on subways, picking up waitresses, bar girls, any female who crosses his path, really. If no one’s available, there are always hookers to pay; and failing that, there’s always Mr. Lefty. Fassbender really lays his cards on the table in a three-way towards the end, his visage scrunched up into a tortured porn face, a look of out-of-body desperation as he seeks a certain something that will never satisfy almost painful to watch. The closest to this type of existential, self-loathing acting I’ve encountered was Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant, keening and wailing because he’s trapped in the human condition with an essentially animal nature.

Both Mavis and Brandon, in fact, abuse their own bodies, as though destroying the flesh could eradicate the unsavory thoughts ruling their every waking moment. Mavis drowns her sorrows in scotch and literary delusions; Brandon plunges deeper and deeper (pardon the metaphor) into sexual self-annihilation. And since this is hard-to-watch art house cinema, neither movie offers any convenient Hollywood resolution for the lead character.

I’m not sure if Shame explains much about why sex addicts are the way they are, and I’m not sure if Young Adult really offers much insight into mental illness, but both offer powerhouse performances on topics that actors tend to shy away from: ugliness and shame. Is it merely coincidence that those with killer looks — like Theron and Fassbender — tend to flog themselves on the big screen, masking beauty in ugliness?