Memos, Coffee, Spankings

Well, spank me with a stiletto! Secretary, winner of a Special Jury Prize for originality at the 2002 Sundance Festival, features a screenplay written by one of our own: Duke associate theater professor, Erin Cressida Wilson.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is Lee Holloway, a directionless 20-something endowed with a compulsive conscience and the most enviable collection of '80s-style office apparel this side of Murphy Brown's closet. Following a stint in rehab for self-mutilation, Lee returns home to your run-of-the-mill dysfunctional family and lands her first job as a secretary in the offices of Mr. E. Edward Grey (James Spader), a local lawyer who administers minor lawsuits and firm spankings.

Grey just needs a helping hand. Lee just needs a boss. But what starts as a kinky little bit o' somethin'-somethin' turns into a torturous tug-of-war between lonely hearts, troubled minds and (need we say it) aching loins. Lee and Grey pay homage to a pop-psychology feeding frenzy of inhibitions, compulsions, obsessions and sexual fantasies. Neither can quite shake the conviction of chronic abnormality, and of being outsiders in a world that plays by the rules.

Time out. Secretary is not some asinine romantic comedy about oddballs and unlikely love, and I think the more overt symbolism and the easy melodrama of the story are a ruse intended to hide a more intense agenda. Secretary likes to outsmart its audience, and it panders briefly to a contingent of pseudo-intellectuals who'll pat themselves on the back for seeing an "Art Film" and reaffirm their suspicions that Everything is Society's Fault.

But beneath the slick veneer, there's something a little deeper and far more sinister at work. Secretary thrusts its audience outside a self-imposed comfort zone which has nothing to do with diversity objectives, dialogue and other such PC superficiality. Secretary is strong, sexual and graphic; and the very fact that it can be so disturbing is testimony to the depth of its conflict. The discomfort of the audience mirrors, on a smaller scale, the same self-imposed division of right, wrong, normal and abnormal which spawn the couple's magnificent capacity for self-hatred.

Secretary is a jarring example of alienation between mind and body, and I'm going to wrap up this review right now, before I'm tempted to toss in a half-assed thesis and hand it in for ninth-grade Honors English credit. Apologies.

On a more serious note, give Secretary a look; films with this level of depth and creativity are few and far between. But be warned: What you get out of the movie is up to you. If it's mindless entertainment you're after, I recommend The Transporter. I hear it's pretty good.