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Also this issue: Pleasure Principals 8 Women Screen Picks |
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September 26-October 2, 2002
movies
 LETTER RIP: Maggie Gyllenhaal is fetching in Secretary. |
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An office assistant finds spanky love with her boss in Secretary.
SecretaryDirected by Steven Shainberg A Lions Gate Films release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse
RECOMMENDED
Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) cuts herself. She keeps a sewing kit with carefully selected sharp implements she uses to slice her thighs (where no one will see), then Band-Aids the wounds. The process is precise, the pain exquisite, and the combined sense of release and control all too fleeting.
You meet Lee on the day she's released from "the institution," which also happens to be the wedding day of her perfect sister (Amy Locane). The theme is pink and she wears baggy blue; she stands apart, trying to avoid her family, but is soon beset by her alcoholic father (Stephen McHattie) and overbearing mother Joan (Lesley Ann Warren). They want her to be happy ("Do you know how much we missed you, pumpkin?"), and can't (or won't) imagine what's keeping her so locked up inside herself. It's not long before Lee's back in her drab, sad bedroom, digging through the sewing kit.
Secretary is about anxiety, depression, the inability to communicate. It's also about to turn into a romance, when Lee gets a job as a secretary for attorney E. Edward Grey (James Spader). When she first walks into the deep-green-walled office, weighed down by heavy furniture and draperies, she looks as though she might break. But Edward, morose and fidgety, gives her a chance, for which she is grateful. Each day, she takes dictation, types letters on a big old Selectric, makes coffee, "freshens up" the mousetrap.
Lee works hard, but still, she makes mistakes, typos that Edward marks with a big red pen. Nervous as she is, Lee finds herself liking his reprimands, and starts making errors on purpose, so he'll call her into his office. At the same time, he's noting her tremulous behavior, the cuts on her legs, and, no small thing, her beautiful behind. Finally, Edward can stand it no longer: He confronts. One thing leads to another and then, he spanks her. And Lee, bent over his desk, her face red from hurt and ecstasy, has found the man of her dreams.
Adapted by playwright Erin Cressida Wilson from a Mary Gaitskill short story, Steven Shainberg's first feature juggles several attitudes at once, observing Lee and Edward from various distances (so their behaviors and needs might appear "kinky" and strange, as well as sympathetic), as well as allowing you singular access to Lee's lonely, thoughtful, admittedly unusual but also understandable existence. Her narration establishes not only her self-awareness, but also her insights into those around her. She's no simple victim, but evolves into a submissive partner in a relationship predicated on desire. That her desire might not be yours makes her difficult, even "freaky." That she comprehends and articulates her journey -- away from her clueless family, toward a relationship that makes sense of her pain -- makes the film's focus less Lee's various abilities than your willingness to go along with her.
At first, Secretary's inappropriateness lets you off the hook: Amy Danger's hyper-real set design and Steven Fierberg's color-saturated cinematography recall David Lynch's suburban underworlds, an effect helped along by Angelo Badalamenti's ooky score. Lee's existence, simultaneously mundane and extreme, eventually seems a mirror for yours. Her fear of displeasing Joan is surely scripted, as is her initial gratitude to Edward, the love-lust object who invites her to step outside her routine. And while her gaspy, sensuous appreciation of the raw, red handprints on her derriere may stretch your usual identification processes, it also underlines the vanilla tedium of romance conventions.
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The most provocative aspect of Lee's devotion to Edward has to do with power, of course. He's initially attracted by her seeming reserve, then moved by her excessive vulnerability, her capacity for giving herself over, a power he sorely lacks. On the face of their exchanges, she's submissive and he's in charge, instructing her to walk home from work rather than take the routine ride home with mom. This would suggest that Lee's evolving sense of "independence" is false, that she's only trading one domineering figure for another. But she's also learning to appreciate and acknowledge her own desires.
Though the film might eventually back off the edge, conjuring a "happy ending" that allows you to leave feeling OK about what you've seen, it does not. The ultra-trite resolution -- involving Lee's voice-over rapture about finding her place, "part of the earth," while Edward lays her on a literal sod-bed -- refuses to back off the outrageousness of anything else that's come before. And for that, you can feel grateful.
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