"Secretary"

Whip me, spank me, correct my spelling mistakes. James Spader stars in a weird tale about the mysteries of desire.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Sep 20, 2002 | All good humanists profess to love movies that cast light on the subtlest angles of human experience. But how many are going to line up to see a movie about spanking? Or, more specifically, how many are even going to realize that they ought to?

When it comes to movies that explore the vast mysteries of life, we've all been well trained to accept the most banal life-force crapola about love, death and family relationships. But sex -- which, you could argue, is the source of life's most damnably confounding mysteries -- is still the final frontier. There are plenty of trembling, anxious watchdogs of the culture who have been claiming for years that there's too much sex in American movies, when the reality is that there is hardly any at all. What we do have is a whole lot of people rolling around in artfully mussed beds, sheets arranged to cover their privates just so -- a hurried, embarrassed shorthand stroke for something whose letters we don't dare to spell out.

Steven Shainberg's strange and wonderful "Secretary" spells out the letters and more, but not in an orderly, comfortable way -- it's more as if he were spilling them like dice out of a cup, as a kind of jarring reassurance that they're not going to immediately make sense to us. That Shainberg does ultimately make sense of them (as much sense as we can reasonably demand of the human heart and the other organs that spring to attention at its merest whim) will probably rattle some people. "Secretary" has already been referred to as "pornographic" and "disturbing" by some critics. But both of those words suggest a kind of deliberate prurience that the movie just doesn't have. It's a liberating, kindhearted picture, one whose ending brings with it the feeling that something has finally been shaken free. How comfortable you feel with that is completely up to you.

"Secretary" -- which was adapted, with significant changes, from a terrific short story by Mary Gaitskill -- is also extremely funny in places, as the truest movies about sex must always be. But its funniest moments have very serious underpinnings: There are times when "Secretary" is difficult to watch, simply because it's never easy to watch a character in emotional pain. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Lee Holloway, a socially awkward, withdrawn young woman who has just been released from a stint in a mental hospital and has returned home to live with her disjointed family, including a troubled alcoholic father (Stephen McHattie) and a quiveringly sunny, overprotective mother (Lesley Ann Warren). Lee has to find a job and begin an adult life, now that her emotional problems have ostensibly been cured: Since the seventh grade, she has been ritualistically and obsessively cutting herself. She keeps a box of sharp implements and antiseptic hidden under her bed, its cover decorated with heartbreakingly girlish metallic butterfly stickers. One of her favorite tools is a pastel-colored plastic ballerina figure, the toe shoe of one extended leg fetishistically sharpened into a stiletto. Lee knows she needs to kick this behavior once and for all, but she just can't bring herself to throw away that box.

Lee does find a job, landing at the office of E. Edward Grey (James Spader), a mysterious lawyer who needs her only to answer the phone and type letters (never on a computer but on a clackety old IBM Selectric dinosaur -- and that's only the beginning of his fetishes). Mr. Grey keeps rare, exotic flowers behind glass in his office; he also has a row of red markers lined up just so in his desk drawer, although we don't, at first, know why. He's clearly an odd guy. Before Lee enters his office for the first time, he sits nervously at his desk, twitching and fiddling with things; he takes a quick look at his wild-eyed reflection in a mirror and smooths his hair roughly, like an ape mimicking a man getting ready for a hot date.

And before long, Mr. Grey has revealed his quirks to Lee in all their shameful glory. After just a few weeks in the job, Lee clicks into the luxurious monotony of it -- it suits her intensely private, buttoned-up nature -- and begins to develop something of a romantic crush on her boss. He seems to have something else in mind: He spends weeks eyeing her nervously, in her stiff bow-blouses, flesh-toned knee-high stockings, and clumpy black moccasin shoes (a depressive's idea of secretary wear). One day, he circles one of her typing errors with one of those thick red pens he's been hoarding -- at last, we know what they're for -- and calls her into his office, where he orders her to place the letter on his desk, bend over and read it aloud. He then proceeds to spank her soundly.

What develops between them -- the current that begins with Mr. Grey's shame and excitement over his own desires and runs its way to the very nerve endings of Lee's bottom -- at first seems like your textbook case of mutual and rather kinky obsession. Lee realizes that the spankings excite her like nothing else in her life; there's a trenchantly funny moment when she tries to convey an inkling of this to her befuddled, sweet-natured boyfriend (played by Jeremy Davies), who can't conceive of the thrill of sex in anything but the gentlest terms. "I didn't hurt you, did I?" he asks, after she finally surrenders to his plain-vanilla grunting and grinding. "No," she replies languidly, staring beyond his shoulder and into the reaches of some erotic deep space where he'll never be able to follow.

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