Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Secretary, 24 Hour Party People

Movie Guru Rating (both movies):
Enlightening (4 out of 5)

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Maggie Gyllenhaal takes a licking in Secretary

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

If you've heard anything at all about Secretary, you've probably heard it's about spanking. And it is, or at least spanking plays a prominent role in the movie. If you happen to be a spanking fetishist, you probably won't be disappointed by the, er, handful of actual bum-whacking scenes. Really, there's material here to fuel fantasies of all sorts.

But like other taboo explorations of recent years—Exotica (strip clubs), Kissed (necrophilia), Tokyo Decadence (S&M), Spanking the Monkey (incest)—Secretary is more than the sum of its perversions. It's an odd but likable character study of a troubled young woman, Lee (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who finds liberation in an unexpected way. It's a literate and thoughtful movie, adapted but radically altered from a chillier short story by Mary Gaitskill. It is also, on its own terms, yearningly romantic.

First-time director Steven Shainberg opens with a jaw-dropping scene — Gyllenhaal in smart, prim, professional dress clothes walking around a lush neo-Victorian office with her wrists shackled to a wooden yoke across her shoulders. She staples some papers with her chin, fetches a fax with her teeth, and then prepares and carries a cup of coffee down the hallway. Her walk is jaunty, her hips swinging, and she's smiling the whole time. The movie then flashes back to six months earlier, when Lee has just been released from a mental hospital. She's an awkward and nervous creature, furtive and hunched over. Her family life is miserable. Her father's a pathetic and sometimes violent drunk, her mother a clingy enabler. Lee responds by hiding in her bedroom and methodically cutting and burning her thighs and arms (in one telling scene, she uses a Barbie doll's sharpened foot to scrape at her flesh). How will this post-adolescent headcase transform into the confident shackle-bearer in the first scene?

She does so through the offices, literal and otherwise, of lawyer E. Edward Grey (James Spader). After acing a typing class, Lee finds Grey through a classified ad and takes a job as his secretary. He's remote and fastidious, but he quickly senses some things about Lee. She will do whatever he asks, without complaint—even digging through the dumpster for a discarded file. She seems to like being told what to do. The more abuse Grey heaps on her, for her attire or her telephone voice or her typos, the more she strives to please him. And things escalate from there.

The movie is striking in several ways (no pun intended). There's the audacity of the scenario in the age of sexual-harassment lawsuits, to which the script knowingly alludes. There's the way it balances deliberately between the erotic and the ridiculous (anyone who's been to a nightclub fetish show can tell you S&M role-playing is more likely to look silly than shocking). Shainberg's assured storytelling carries the movie even through an over-the-top ending. And there are Lee and the lawyer, who are more complicated and more eccentrically alive than most of the misfits and emotional zombies in movies about damaged souls. Spader turns in another of his creepy-guy-with-a-heart routines, with all his insecurities showing. But it's really Gyllenhaal's movie, and she makes it work. In the key scenes where Lee has to decide how to act or react, Gyllenhaal makes her choices not just believable but somehow reasonable. Her big oval eyes and angular body register Lee's growing assuredness, even as she is regularly humiliated. Her submission frees her, because—unlike all the other pain in her life—it's something she chooses for herself.

Party People remembers the Hacienda

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

It's hard for me to get much critical distance from 24 Hour Party People. The movie chronicles a place and time—Manchester, U.K., from the late 1970s to the early 1990s—that I actually lived in for a while. As an exchange student in Manchester in 1990-91, I was there for the tail end of the rock and dance music scene that revolved around the Hacienda nightclub, the Factory Records label, and Tony Wilson, who owned both of them.

24 Hour Party People is a brisk, cheeky telling of the Wilson tale, how he leveraged his career as a regional TV host and his early enthusiasm for punk rock to construct a mini-empire that included a handful of legendary bands (Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays) and a lot of sex, drugs and house music. British comedian Steve Coogan plays Wilson as a manic intellectual visionary with an outsized ego and a love of his scrappy northern city (the film is dedicated "to the people of Manchester").

The movie is playfully loose with the facts, and periodically the actual people involved in the events will pop up on screen to correct the record. Although it was directed by Michael Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo), it feels like a group project; almost all of the key players, including Wilson himself, collaborated as consultants. If you've never heard of New Order, much less Joy Division, you might be baffled that anyone bothered to make a film about any of it. And the atonal, drug-gobbling dance-punks of Happy Mondays are no more likely to make sense to American ears now than they did 12 years ago. But even a casual viewer will gather that the whole enterprise (which left a few people dead and almost everyone broke) was a lot of fun along the way. So's the movie.