His name is Brandon, and he’s a sex addict. The central figure of "Shame," artist-turned-director Steve McQueen’s mostly disappointing follow-up to his extraordinary "Hunger," is a man who, from the outside, appears to have it all: a big-office job at a New York firm, a midtown apartment, and the looks of Michael Fassbender. It’s no wonder he gets laid all the time. But this isn’t the life of a playboy to Brandon, it's one of sick compulsion; his waking life is split between anonymous sex, often with prostitutes, and masturbating joylessly in the office bathroom. "Shame" opens with Brandon lying naked in bed, a striking composition that emphasizes his physical presence above all else. The body is important to Steve McQueen; he laid it out as political object in "Hunger," its decay an act of protest, and as an expression of an emotional state, bearing the weight of internal trauma in "Shame." In both films, McQueen’s chosen model is the brilliant, body-and-soul performance of Michael Fassbender.

Fassbender’s physical presence as hunger-striking IRA activist Bobby Sands in "Hunger" meshed perfectly with McQueen’s style and the material, a structuralist take on political thought, action, and filmmaking. Fassbender doesn't so much sync with "Shame's" subject as he does transcend it, lending  a real sense of tragedy to frequently dunderheaded material. Brandon is another in a long line of secretly miserable rich dudes, and as "Shame" begins, his hidden life already seems to be taking its toll. Things get even worse with the unexpected arrival of "Sissy" (Carey Mulligan, movingly balancing neediness and exposed-nerve volatility), a singer who comes to crash on Brandon’s couch. She becomes a reminder of some shared childhood trauma between them—whether its sexual abuse or even incest, the details aren’t important—and her fragile state sends Brandon into a tailspin. The first cracks of this show at one of Sissy’s gigs, when Brandon starts to cry during her slow, sad rendition of “New York, New York.”

It’s a helluva town, New York, and in "Shame" it’s a Hell of a town, a false idol to myths of escape and self-reinvention. McQueen isn’t particularly interested in Brandon and Sissy’s self-destructive behavior in itself, but as a manifestation of Brandon's troubled adolescence. Brandon seems to be living the American dream, having achieved great success in the big city. It’s a lie, of course, one that collapses when confronted by his less outwardly stable sister. McQueen suggests a cycle of sibling dependency and abandonment, and the scars on Sissy’s arm act as a scorecard, like bedpost notches ticking off each failed attempt to escape the past. The problem is that this is nothing new, and "Shame’s" drama tends toward the over-determined and silly. Brandon and Sissy are vaguely drawn by design, and McQueen doesn’t seem all that concerned with getting to know them as people: two key scenes between them take place with their backs to the camera, a background object drawing most of the composition’s attention.

McQueen is frequently more interested in creating an environment and a mood, to which end he doubles down on style. There’s no doubt he's a stunning formalist; on a purely visual level, much of "Shame" is unquestionably striking. But where "Hunger’s" form was essential to its meaning, "Shame’s" seems more or less arbitrary, an admirable but doomed attempt to gussy up its fundamentally hollow subject matter. While some sequences pack a punch, the tone is more frequently one-note, bordering on hysterical, particularly the bludgeoning effect of Harry Escott’s score. Fassbender, then, is near-heroic. There are moments—I’m thinking of Brandon’s long night-time jog, for example, or his attempts at a normal relationship with a co-worker, or the series of scenes that close out the film—where his performance and McQueen’s style sync up, creating a rigorous, emotionally volatile world that hints at what a successful version of "Shame" might have looked like. But what’s missing is an idea, an organizing principle to give it all shape and specificity. Without one, "Shame" is at once too much and almost nothing at all.

Review by:
Matt Noller