secondtake
Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)This is in some ways a remarkable movie. It makes a small time cult-like commune in the Catskills very real and unspectacular. The leading character who gets sucked into this world, Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), plays perfectly a girl turning young woman who is naive and out of sync with reality enough to fall into such a falsely loving mire. Ah, I pass judgment already. But it is a mire, and the movie makes this clear with increasing violence as it goes. In fact, the one flaw of the movie might be its turning to such a spectacular end when at first it is the utter plainness (and believability) that make it float.This is a quiet movie. The rape is quiet, the murder is quiet (and so sudden you don't know quite what happened). And all the conversations are quiet, either from the coercive sweet-talking men who trick the girls into submission or from family who has forgotten (or never knew) how to love. But it works, slowly, surely, and with Olsen's deft performance, sharply. It cuts into the possibility honestly.There might be issues here for a critical mind, though some I can't say much about for fear of giving away some finer points. But the vagueness that works so well in some ways (avoiding having to clarify generalities) also makes for a kind of laxness. We have to go with the presumptions here, for example, of how much a girl like this would actually take (and be so naive about). One thing sorely lacking, I admit, is some basic clarity of why she would do this, what led to her going astray. This is what every parent wonders, naturally.But when I write astray I come to the trickiest and best part of the movie: the alternative world of this "cult/commune" is actually pretty nice. People live simply, they love each other with true tenderness, they seem to avoid the hypocrisy and materialism of the rest of the world. Take away the patriarchy and abuse (which is not possible, I'm sure), but take it away and you possibly have a true utopia. With the right frame of mind.That's the crux of the success here—plausibility leading to an attractive alternative, riddled with outrageous flaws.
rowmorg
What hell it must be, to be a hot girl when there's no one to take care of you. Particularly if you find your way into a cultish group on a farm where people seem to have taken leave of their common sense. They have group sex, produce boy-children indiscriminately, and occasionally kill living creatures, animal and human, with no associated emotion. The titular heroine, being a beauteous hottie, is ruthlessly shagged by all the men until her loins must ache and her mind is bending. At last she escapes, and one of the fellows who has been having her, finds her in the local town, lazily snacking on hotcakes. He then leaves her there, and she manages to call her long-lost sister, who drives three hours to fetch her. This is where she starts to become defined as mad, because of her misfit behaviour (swimming nude, joining her sister in bed while her sister is getting noisily shafted). Finally, in a fit, she kicks her brother- in-law down the stairs and tells her sister she would make a lousy mother. The couple decide to take her into town with them and get her treatment. At the end, as they are driving into town, someone seems to take over the car, and she sees the cult leader's big black SUV behind her. End: yes, we are abandoned by the film-maker as the action is just about to start, and we realise we have been watching the preliminaries only, not the real film. I'd like to see Elizabeth Olsen again, it's so nice when a talented actress also has breasts, (as any reader of my reviews will know). She carries this film, but it's a heavy load. Not recommended.
brchthethird
This was an excellent psychological drama with an impressive performance by Elizabeth Olsen. She plays a young woman who escapes from a cult and stays with her sister, but still has memories of the life she left behind that interfere with her ability to reintegrate. The whole story is rather subdued, but has some moments of quiet intensity and pain. I also liked how the story of her past and her present are intercut and told side by side, with each event having a parallel in or triggering a memory of something that happened to her before. The only downside was (what I felt to be) a rather anti-climactic ending. Other than that, it was a great indie film.
thematrixny
Sorry, but I don't buy in to this "make up your own ending" when it comes to story telling. And after all, isn't that what a movie is? I could list a few redeeming qualities, but even if there is some good acting, or occasional glimpses of an actual story, it is all worthless if there's no plot. What this movie tries to pass off as a plot is nothing more than a partial rip off of a real life event, told with new characters. It's a story we already know. For that to be entertaining, you have to draw the viewer in to the story. Instead, we're only given glimpses here and there of past and present, and it's up to us - the viewers - to write the rest of the film in our heads. How can one score a half finished movie? You can't. Thus the ONE.
AD
