2011
As it turns out, one of the Olsen sisters is actually talented. I wonder what Mary Kate and Ashley think of their little sister now? Elizabeth Olsen is in every scene of this movie and, even when she is on-screen with the terrifying John Hawkes, she owns. She plays a 20 year old girl named Martha who, when we first see her, is running through the woods to get away from an oppressive commune in upstate New York. Marcy May is the nickname given to her by Patrick (Hawkes), the alpha-male of the commune, and Marlene is the generic name for all girls who live there.
Martha, as I will call her, has been out of contact from her family for two years when she realizes that her plan to escape her ordinary life has proven to be much more than she bargained for. The commune is a self-sufficient farm in the middle of the woods that houses many young men and many young women. Patrick is the leader of the commune and makes sure that the women rotate their chores each day so that everyone can know how to do every job. The goal is to become completely self-sufficient and detach completely from the rest of the civilized world. Every girl in the community is forced to have sex with the men, particularly Patrick. The women cannot eat until after the men have finished eating and they also are forbidden to wear makeup, fancy clothing and bras. I suppose the idea of having everyone share everything and have everyone pitch in to work together in order to benefit the entire community is a fine idea, but not when it is ruled by fear and abuse. The women walk around like lifeless shells and, with the exception of Patrick, the men look somewhat similar. It is clear that Patrick is in charge and his grip is suffocating.
Written in pencil on the wall above the telephone, there are directions for what to say when someone calls: "Ask three questions. Repeat name. Take message. Say your name is Marlene Lewis or Michael Lewis."
It is said that Patrick is the father of all of the children in the cult and that all of the children are boys. We assume the worst happens when a baby arrives that is female.
After she runs away, Martha calls the farmhouse looking for her friend Zoey but the girl on the other end (who identifies herself as Marlene Lewis, naturally) tells her that Zoey is not there. Does this mean that women can't take phone calls? Or does it mean that Zoey ran away too? Or perhaps that Zoey was killed because Patrick thought she was withholding information about Martha's whereabouts?
In his feature-length debut, the film was written and directed by Sean Durkin. He manages the flashback timeline quite well by making Martha's past and present look starkly different. Scenes from the commune are grimy and almost out of focus - it seems like there is a ubiquitous fog sitting between the actors and the lens of the camera. Conversely, scenes that take place at Martha's sister's house in the present are modern and sharp.
Martha runs away from this cult, which sounds an awful lot like what I've read about Charles Manson's 'family,' and calls her sister to come pick her up. Once back at her sister Lucy's beautiful, country home in Connecticut, some three hours from where she was picked up, Martha struggles to assimilate back into normalcy. Hours after meeting Lucy's husband Ted for the first time, Martha strips off all of her clothes and jumps into the lake completely nude. Days later, when Martha hears Lucy and Ted having sex late at night, she sneaks onto the corner of their bed and lays in the fetal position for a few seconds before being discovered. Lucy asks Martha several times in the movie, "What is wrong with you?" Martha doesn't know.
Durkin gives us increasingly disturbing glimpses of what occurred on the commune during Martha's two years there. Whether it was shooting sick cats, forced sexual promiscuity or breaking into people's houses, Patrick controls everything and everyone. Martha is filled with fear and paranoia and often struggles to separate her two realities. As she begins to lose control over mind and her body, Lucy and Ted encourage her to seek help.
It is never quite clear how Martha stumbled into this cult or why she decided to leave her life in the first place. We are told that her mother died and that her father may have been abusive. Lucy, who seems to be about 15 years older than Martha, feels guilty that she wasn't around when her sister was finishing high school and should have been applying to colleges and thinking about her career goals. Martha tells Lucy that she has been living with a boyfriend for two years in the Catskill Mountains, and that she had to leave because he lied to her. Martha never tells Lucy anything about what really happened to her, but Lucy knows it was something more than a bad breakup. Her once-innocent little sister has returned as a fractured vessel of what she once was and Lucy cannot figure out why.
I last saw John Hawkes in my favorite movie from 2010, Winter's Bone, in which he also played a terrifying alpha-male role. Although he must only weigh about 150 pounds soaking wet, he has a knack for conveying a great deal of strength and intimidation with a believable tinge of crazy. His biceps have the circumference of most men's wrists, but still I would not mess with him.
The tagline on the cover of the Blu-Ray for this movie is "You can get away, but you can never escape." After she runs away, Martha's fear and paranoia of being discovered by someone from the cult is real - we feel what she feels as she is compulsively looking out the window of her sister's house wondering if the next car she sees will belong to a very pissed off Patrick. I loved the ending of this movie, which reminded me of some other wonderfully ambiguous endings that I have seen in recent months, most notably in Kelly Reichardt's 2011 slow-burn western Meek's Cutoff.
I found the tone of this film riveting and suspenseful. The score, which sounded a lot like Johnny Greenwood's work in There Will Be Blood, worked to increase the film's tension. The acting, particularly by the most talented Olsen sister alive, was fantastic. This movie was at or near the top of many critics' lists from 2011, but I can't say that it would quite crack my top ten.
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Even though I couldn't fit it in anywhere in my entry above, I wanted to include a few lines that Patrick says to Martha shortly before she flees the commune:
"Death is beautiful because we all fear death. Fear is the most amazing emotion of all because it creates complete awareness. It brings you to now and makes you truly present. And when you're truly present, that's nirvana. And that's pure love. So death is pure love."
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