Flak Magazine: Review of Secretary, 10-16-02

Secretary is not a film for the easily shocked. It includes scenes of spanking, masturbation, emotional torture and a desiccated worm. Its protagonists — secretary Lee Halloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and her boss, the lawyer E. Edward Grey (James Spader) — go to great lengths to prove their S&M affection for each other. But when they finally tie the knot, the bondage gear goes in the closet. The movie wants to shock, but it never escapes the orbit of tradition: girl has problems, girl meets boy, boy solves girl's problems.

The story revolves around Lee, just out of a mental hospital, living at home and in need of some quick cash. She soon finds herself at the front desk of Grey's one-man law firm (her one skill, social or professional, is typing). Grey — from the beginning a creepy, unstable fellow — becomes at first fatherly, then abusive, taking over from her alcoholic father (whose domestic rage, the film implies, is what drove her into an institution in the first place). But when his abuse becomes physical — spanking Lee for a typo-ridden letter — she blossoms; soon he's strapping a saddle on her back.

Secretary has the look and feel of a high mannerist painting — all contrasts and exaggerated characters, which director Steven Shainberg puts to good use. The difference between Grey's office, with its Montana/Malaysia/Manhattan chic, and the Halloways' perfect suburban bliss goes a long way to establish the tension between Lee's work and domestic lives. No more needs to be said, and thankfully, nothing is — other than a few sidelong glances at the dinner table, Lee's family never acknowledges that Grey is taking over her life to the point of dictating how much food she can eat ("One scoop of mashed potatoes, a little butter, four peas and as much ice cream as you want," he tells her over the phone.)

But Shainberg isn't consistent — like a complex joke, the story demands exacting precision in how it plays out, and too often it breaks where it should bend. Toward the end, to prove her love to Grey, Lee sits at his desk for several days, attracting a small brace of supporters and reporters to his office; when Grey finally shows up, he is hounded by microphones. It's a clear stab at the media's obsession with sexual deviance, and it's completely out of place in a movie built so tightly around two characters.

Secretary would have us believe that we live in a post-feminist world where if a couple of folks find they have mutual sado-masochist tendencies, more power to them. And Gyllenhaal does do a remarkable job of portraying a woman who flowers only when she learns how to express her deepest desires. But at times she does it too well; by going from dowdy to sexy in three orgasms flat, she shows us little of what it takes to get there.

There is little depth to the character, and ultimately Lee's budding fascination with Grey is little more than a stand-in for our own desire for vicarious perversity. Despite the over-the-top psychological backstory of an alcoholic father, it's not at all clear why Lee doesn't pack up and run the first time Grey raises his voice. There's nothing particularly attractive about him. Furthermore, unlike with Lee, we never know much about his past or his motivations. Ultimately, she does what we want her to do — lose control by falling under Grey's control, get spanked and then play with herself in the bathroom. Of course, this may be what her character would do anyway, but given the way the camera plays on her face, the way it tracks her hand, it's hard not to believe that what Shainberg wants is less to explicate Lee's character than to give his audience a good frisson.

In the penultimate scene, which looks like it was cribbed from an episode of "The Red Shoe Diaries," Lee and Grey romp languorously through a cheesy soft-core boudoir; he washes her hair and licks her knees, and the audience gets a full-frontal shot of a very naked Gyllenhaal. No bondage gear, no torture, no worms — rather, a lot of soft lighting and sumptuous fabrics. It's the antithesis of everything their relationship is built on, and the opposite of what we are meant to believe they would want.

Or not. If Shainberg is, as it seems increasingly likely as the film progresses, more interested in giving the audience good soft-core rather than good psychodrama, then it's in fact perfectly consistent to end the movie with a very conventional, very un-kinky love scene. Instead of being scolded for objectifying Lee, the audience is rewarded.

And so is Lee. The last scene — sorry for the spoiler — shows her, recently married to Grey, sitting on the front porch of his house, watching as he drives away to work. Beautiful in face, natural in poise, she is the perfect picture of personal confidence — and domesticity. At the beginning of the film she wants nothing more than to get a job; now, free of her father, married to a strong, (literally) dominant male, she is happy to stay at home. But it's not the sort of dominance we'd expect her to be into, and it's not the sort of ending you'd expect from a film that relies heavily on corporal punishment as a plot point. But then Secretary is hardly the transgressive film it pretends to be.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)