Reason.com - Free Minds and Free Markets
Reason logo Reason logo
  • Latest
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Archives
    • Subscribe
    • Crossword
  • Video
  • Podcasts
    • All Shows
    • The Reason Roundtable
    • The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie
    • The Soho Forum Debates
    • Just Asking Questions
    • The Best of Reason Magazine
    • Why We Can't Have Nice Things
  • Volokh
  • Newsletters
  • Donate
    • Donate Online
    • Donate Crypto
    • Ways To Give To Reason Foundation
    • Torchbearer Society
    • Planned Giving
  • Subscribe
    • Reason Plus Subscription
    • Print Subscription
    • Gift Subscriptions
    • Subscriber Support

Login Form

Create new account
Forgot password

Culture

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Who's that girl?

Kurt Loder | 10.21.2011 5:30 PM

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL
Media Contact & Reprint Requests

Apart from having one of the most easily forgotten titles in recent recall, Martha Marcy May Marlene is a movie without a point. As a demonstration of the sinister nature of hippie commune-cults, the picture conveys a lesson that was already learned-to-death, literally, in the 1960s. It's all empty foreboding and shuttered import, and you walk out of it shrugging.

And yet the movie gets under your skin; while it's up on the screen, it casts a dark spell. The writer-director, Sean Durkin, crafting his first feature, weaves together two clashing worlds—the scrubby rural commune and a luxe Connecticut lake house—with an intricacy of tone that's striking. Most impressive, though, is Elizabeth Olsen, who plays the film's haunted protagonist and gives a breakthrough performance of the sort that launched Jennifer Lawrence in last year's Winter's Bone.  

Olsen—the younger sister of mini-moguls Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, something you'd never, ever guess—plays Martha, an obscurely troubled young woman who dropped off the face of the earth following the death of her mother two years earlier and fetched up in a Catskills commune run by a bony, inscrutable older man named Patrick (John Hawkes, another memorable presence in Winter's Bone). The commune is a collection of young lost souls, and Patrick rigorously trains them in the ways of the new paradise he's creating. By day, his flock chops wood and roots around in a scrabbly vegetable patch. There are also several babies to be tended to—apparently the issue of the ritual rapes to which Patrick subjects each new female arrival. (Following her own assault, Martha is told that the pain she feels is "part of the cleansing.") In the evening, his wards gather around a bare-board table for their one meal of the day—men first, then the women—following which the men drive off on mysterious, unexplained missions. (We later see what they've been up to in a scene of savage menace that will stir a familiar echo for Manson Family buffs.)

In addition to all this, there are regular pistol-practice sessions and occasional all-hands-on-deck orgies overseen by Patrick with hooded appreciation. We see how these kids are seduced into such activities: Patrick is a master manipulator, exerting and withdrawing his approval with smooth expertise. In one extraordinary scene, shot in a single take, we see him with a guitar, surrounded by his flock, serenading Martha—whom he's renamed Marcy May—with a song he has composed just for her, comparing her to a picture on his wall: "She's just a picture, that's all," he sings, rather unnervingly.

The movie offers us no clue as to how Martha has arrived at such a place, or what other sort of life she might be capable of living. She's clearly unstable, but there's little more to the character than that, so we're not even sure why she eventually slips away from the commune and calls out for rescue to her estranged sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who's currently living with her husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), at their lakeside getaway in Connecticut. Once arrived there, Martha, having long since slipped the shackles of conventional society, proves to be an enormous pain in the ass. To take a swim, she simply sheds her clothes and jumps in the water. She asks Lucy why her house is so big, as if that were a violation of ethical norms. Alone with Ted for a moment she asks, "Is it true married people don't fuck?" And when she hears Ted and Lucy making love one night, she goes to their bedroom and climbs under the covers with them. "It's a big bed," she says, in response to their outrage. "You were on the other side."

Durkin blends the back-and-forth between Martha's two worlds into an engrossing dream state, something just short of a horror movie. And Olsen, with her blank intensity and tethered distress, manages to make the director's murky narrative signify: She draws us into the character, and we want to learn more—much more—about her. We never do, though. Can a woman so damaged ever find safe haven? The movie's ambiguously chilly conclusion offers no cause for hope.   

Kurt Loder is a writer living in New York. His third book, a collection of film reviews called The Good, the Bad and the Godawful, will be out on November 8th from St. Martin's Press. Follow him on Twitter at kurt_loder.


Start your day with Reason. Get a daily brief of the most important stories and trends every weekday morning when you subscribe to Reason Roundup.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

NEXT: "The Occupiers have the wrong address. The subprime crisis was designed in Washington, not New York."

Kurt Loder is a New York writer who also hosts the SiriusXM interview show True Stories.

CultureMoviesStaff Reviews
Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL
Media Contact & Reprint Requests

Show Comments (14)

Latest

How Trump's Tariffs and Immigration Policies Could Make Housing Even More Expensive

M. Nolan Gray | From the July 2025 issue

Photo: Dire Wolf De-extinction

Ronald Bailey | From the July 2025 issue

How Making GLP-1s Available Over the Counter Can Unlock Their Full Potential

Jeffrey A. Singer | From the June 2025 issue

Bob Menendez Does Not Deserve a Pardon

Billy Binion | 5.30.2025 5:25 PM

12-Year-Old Tennessee Boy Arrested for Instagram Post Says He Was Trying To Warn Students of a School Shooting

Autumn Billings | 5.30.2025 5:12 PM

Recommended

  • About
  • Browse Topics
  • Events
  • Staff
  • Jobs
  • Donate
  • Advertise
  • Subscribe
  • Contact
  • Media
  • Shop
  • Amazon
Reason Facebook@reason on XReason InstagramReason TikTokReason YoutubeApple PodcastsReason on FlipboardReason RSS

© 2024 Reason Foundation | Accessibility | Privacy Policy | Terms Of Use

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

r

Do you care about free minds and free markets? Sign up to get the biggest stories from Reason in your inbox every afternoon.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

This modal will close in 10

Reason Plus

Special Offer!

  • Full digital edition access
  • No ads
  • Commenting privileges

Just $25 per year

Join Today!